from Hacker News

Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor

by martinkallstrom on 6/19/13, 7:36 AM with 56 comments

  • by DanielRibeiro on 6/19/13, 8:13 AM

    I've been using dillinger for a while, and I'm very happy with it: http://dillinger.io/

    Also, it is open source: https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger

  • by HaNdTriX on 6/19/13, 8:08 AM

    Looks like Mou (http://mouapp.com/). Does anyone know the differences?
  • by flexterra on 6/19/13, 11:52 AM

    This has the same design as http://mouapp.com which has been on the market for a long time now.

    Mou is donation based so you can try before you donate. The developer is very responsive and the app is constantly updated.

    I really don't get it.

  • by arunoda on 6/19/13, 8:18 AM

    I use Sublime Text 2 with Markdown Preview[1] + Live Reload[2]

    * [1] - https://github.com/revolunet/sublimetext-markdown-preview

    * [2] - https://github.com/dz0ny/LiveReload-sublimetext2

  • by jacobparker on 6/19/13, 10:38 AM

    Does anyone know what happened to the push (primarily by Atwood) to create a spec for Markdown (possibly with a different name)?
  • by marban on 6/19/13, 10:38 AM

    Erato and Mou are all great but they both lack the single most important feature: An iPad app with iCloud sync.

    I've also stopped using iA Writer for their, at times, weird Markdown interpretation.

  • by speg on 6/19/13, 11:58 AM

    All of these (Erato, Mou, MarkdownLive) have noticeable lag while editing. I get that you have to parse and render the markdown, but with todays computing power, is it too much to ask to see the text I just typed as soon as I press the keys?

    This is especially bad when there are images on the page. Why not just render the current block and leave the rest of the page as is.

  • by Void_ on 6/19/13, 8:46 AM

    Also check out my fork of Markdown live, which is exactly this + open-source + bugs + shitty syntax highlighting.

    https://github.com/vojto/markdownlive

  • by benatkin on 6/19/13, 8:22 AM

    Why does this, and other markdown editors, use a fixed width font? It would be nice to have a variable width font by default and a quick toggle button or menu item to switch to a fixed width font.
  • by nickzoic on 6/19/13, 11:04 AM

    You see, on the one hand I think this is kind of admirable. Yay, I type my markdown over here and I can instantly see the bits I got wrong over there.

    But I also can't help thinking, if you're going to all that effort why not go full WYSIWYG, with Markdown as the file format? (You'd need some kind of support for merge markers I suppose, I guess that'd be kind of tricky.)

    You know what it reminds me of? Wordperfect 5.1's Reveal Codes :-)

  • by antihero on 6/19/13, 9:36 AM

    Something I've been looking for for a while: A Markdown WYSIWYG. I personally dislike WYSIWYG, but for clients, it cannot be beaten. Now, most things that clients do in CMSs can be done with Markdown, and it avoids complications with weird HTML output, them trying to do unconventional styling (aka "ruining the website). So something like CKEditor or TinyMCE but outputting Markdown, and constrained to Markdown's limitations.

    Does such a thing exist?

  • by cwt137 on 6/19/13, 10:28 AM

    For Linux folks out there, try ReText http://sf.net/projects/retext/ It is an editor for Markdown and reStructuredText. There is syntax highlighting and a live preview mode. The app is written with the Qt library (so it probably looks best in KDE), but it works and looks fine in Gnome.
  • by Wintamute on 6/19/13, 8:06 AM

    FYI a search for "Erato" in the UK App Store is yielding no results. But the App Store link on your site works ...
  • by irickt on 6/19/13, 3:19 PM

    Here's a worthy contender: https://github.com/rvagg/morkdown Open source, Node.js and Chrome based, Github flavored.
  • by btipling on 6/19/13, 11:27 AM

    This is nice. I use Byword which doesn't have monospaced fonts for code blocks, but does the preview right in the editor. It's nice for non-code related markdown stuff.
  • by noptic on 6/19/13, 11:30 AM

    Can you change the title to: Erato - simple and beautiful markdown editor for Mac Markdown is used on many systems and not everyone is intrested in reading about Mac software.
  • by miles on 6/19/13, 9:03 AM

    Out of curiosity, why not support 10.6? Are there some features that rely on Lion or ML? If 10.6 had been supported, I would have purchased a copy.
  • by jameswyse on 6/19/13, 11:21 AM

    I use Mou and am pretty happy with it, though I'll switch in an instant if this support Github Flavoured Markdown..
  • by grimborg on 6/19/13, 9:41 AM

    I'd love to see something like the editor in Medium, but implementing the whole markdown and that can run offline.
  • by jawngee on 6/19/13, 11:10 AM

    Does this support/show Github's extensions to markdown. In particular, syntax highlighting for languages?
  • by omegote on 6/19/13, 8:54 AM

    For this I use grunt-markdown and grunt-watch (that integrates LiveReload).
  • by Nekorosu on 6/19/13, 10:51 AM

    I don't feel the difference between Erato and Mou is worth $5.99.
  • by sneak on 6/19/13, 10:01 AM

    Are chromeless markdown text editors the new static site generators?