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Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

by ggordan on 3/25/15, 11:39 AM with 69 comments

• by jfroma on 3/25/15, 1:44 PM

  Shameless plug: I worked on a similar tool mdocs [1]. The main difference is that is opensource, it supports authentication and authorization [2] similar to Google Docs. The authorization part allows you to share documents at company level.

  It is a 100% client-side application, it uses Firebase as backend and Auth0 for authentication.

  [1] https://auth0.github.io/mdocs2

  [2] https://dl.dropbox.com/s/w6bmji4t698v8qn/ss-2015-03-25T10-40...

• by jawns on 3/25/15, 12:20 PM

  Collaborative editing is great, and I wonder if this project could be adapted as some sort of browser extension that would allow teams to collaboratively edit on pages that don't otherwise support it.

  For instance, the project-management software my team currently uses does not allow us to collaboratively edit tickets. Sometimes we've resorted to writing tickets together in Google Docs and then transferring the text back into the project-management tool. It would be awesome if we could use Fiddle.md or a similar tool right there on the page, rather than having to transfer text between tabs.

• by wrl on 3/25/15, 12:38 PM

  Would be nice if the tab key inserted a tab instead of jumping to the next field (for writing code, etc).

• by CyberShadow on 3/25/15, 1:46 PM

  .md is the ccTLD for my country (Moldova), which got me excited and confused for a bit - was trying to find the connection with music in Eastern Europe. I'm not sure how to feel about such ccTLD abuse and conflating TLDs with file extensions in general.

• by xfalcox on 3/25/15, 12:47 PM

  I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are:

  - Allow custom CSS

  - Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL

  Do you plan to open source it?

• by tobinharris on 3/25/15, 11:24 PM

  Got it working with on-the-fly yUML diagrams.

  Example:

  http://fiddle.md/c74bgs3vthgqm8mtt9kx3z

  Not perfect, but wouldn't take much to make it play nicely?

• by yellowbkpk on 3/25/15, 1:49 PM

  I'm confused how this is collaborative. If a friend sends me a fiddle.md link and I change the content of the document, how do they become aware of my changes? Do I send them my link back?

• by quinndupont on 3/25/15, 5:36 PM

  As an academic that writes in Markdown (usually solo, offline), this ticks so many boxes for me. I love that for once I may be able to convince my co-authors to collaborate in Markdown instead of Google Docs. Integration with Dropbox is crucial to accomplish this (most academics use Dropbox), but it is missing one step: IMPORT!

  It's great to see that I can export to Dropbox, but then how do I roundtrip? Rather than remembering the URL (or copy and pasting from a desktop app), it would be great to be able to load up an existing document from Dropbox, send off a collaboration link, and then have the ability to send the completed (collaboratively written) text back to Dropbox.

• by bambax on 3/25/15, 1:16 PM

  As soon as the content is over a page long, the "preview" doesn't really work, since what is supposed to be previewed is out of bounds.

  I had developed a few years ago a markdown editor with live preview, with a mechanism that synchronized the source and the preview, scroll-wise, so the preview would always display the part that was being edited.

  It didn't take off (at all) so I let it go, but I wish there would be a standardized way to do this.

  Other than that, great tool! Thanks for sharing.

• by jaywunder on 3/27/15, 12:56 AM

  The only thing that prevents me from using this that I can't make an account to save my documents, and I can't get that url bar to go away. The giant bar that says "fiddle.md/b836w36wh2h8mv3fj23t8r/edit" even though I can already see the link in my own URL bar. If there were a way to remove that I might use this. Looks great though!

• by andrewguenther on 3/25/15, 4:41 PM

  Looks just like a bit more polished version of Socrates[1]

  [1] http://socrates.io/

• by brento on 3/25/15, 1:16 PM

  What about user accounts where we can keep track of Fiddles, so we can organize them with tags and categories?

• by orliesaurus on 3/25/15, 2:24 PM

  I love MD support, it makes writing things easy and looks polished, therefore I love this!

  On top of that I believe It's going to make it onto swipe.to ? I hope so because it would be a a much needed addition tool for editing presentations and rendering it on the fly :D

• by halosghost on 3/25/15, 12:35 PM

  These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

• by xomateix on 3/25/15, 1:28 PM

  I've played a bit and it looks really interesting.

  I see you currently support saving the fiddles to dropbox. Do you plan to add other storage systems?

  I'm thinking it would be great to use that along with github to write documentation or even websites using jekyll.

• by cfontes on 3/25/15, 12:38 PM

  Looks interesting... Dark theme?

• by NKCSS on 3/25/15, 1:02 PM

  I love the syntax helper in the bottom. I've added markdown to a few projects and usually, I just added a help text summary near the input to remind users of the syntax; this is a much better solution.

• by ComNik on 3/25/15, 6:38 PM

  Really like the design, especially the search/menu box. It would be very nice to add proper support for tabs, especially when inserting larger blocks of code.

• by nb410 on 3/25/15, 12:40 PM

  I'm a fan of this - elegant and simple way to make markdown more accessible to those who would otherwise shy away from it's learning curve

• by mrborgen on 3/25/15, 1:53 PM

  Very nice! I love how easy you have made it to start a new fiddle, eliminating the signup. I'm all in for less signup walls on the internet!

• by freshyill on 3/25/15, 2:00 PM

  Is it a feature or a bug that the page's title tag also toggles when you toggle the preview/html button?

• by Gurrewe on 3/25/15, 12:18 PM

  > Over Quota > This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

• by alx on 3/25/15, 12:51 PM

  @ggordan : is it using etherpad api for backend ?