Show HN: Collaborative Markdown Trees – write Markdown blocks in a tree | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Collaborative Markdown Trees – write Markdown blocks in a tree

markdowntree.com

3 pointsmarb14 comments

A description/demo might help sell this better than a static image.

I love markdown but I'm not sure I understand what a "markdown tree" is supposed to be?

Thanks for the advice! We thought it should be quite clear from the the image what it does. But probably you are right. We should make an animated gif.

It would be better if there was something to try out or play with because that is the spirit of 'Show HN'.

Can you explain what you might use it for?

It may just be me, it's 10pm and I've only had 2 coffees today.

It could be useful for study notes, programming notes (and code), project planning. It's like a simple Markdown text, but you can nest one Markdown text block to another. You can fold branches you don't need now.

I see. So kind of an outliner meets markdown?

Yes, or maybe markdown meets mindmap

It's an interesting idea. But because we just met, I don't want to provide my Google identity just to learn more. Is there a demo that does not require my identity?

Yeah, many people asked this. Well, I think it's time to add a simple email/password registration. Come back in a few days! Thanks!

For a 'Show HN', no registration is better for me because I'm just going to put in a fake address and a guessable password anyway...if I bother to provide anything at all.

I'd put it this way, 'Show HN' is a good potential way to get feedback on the implementation and idea for the purpose of improving the project/product. There's a lot of expertise here.

On the other hand, for most projects it is probably about average in terms of garnering emails and page views. PR and marketing aren't going to do better.

Finally, in terms of the project, it looks like something I'd expect to see as open source rather than a product/company. It's cool and potentially useful and if it were rolled into an IDE or an editor it could be a great feature.

But it's harder to see how much I would gain by a business commitment. Collaboration means convincing other people to try it, hoping they find it useful, and then learning how to coordinate use.

Opensourcing could be an option in future. For now, we would like to see how people adapt it to their needs. Because it's quite untraditional tool.

But for the collaboration part, it reminds me of Emacs org-mode (which uses a different markup language than MarkDown). Being open source, org-mode might be worth looking at because there is a well-established community of users and a tool that does a lot but does not have strong interactive collaboration. On the other hand, feature parity with org-mode would be non-trivial.

There might be a Github like business model there: a business that improves upon an existing tool and grows by expanding the market.

Speaking about collaboration, most Linux epoch tools don't have a real collaboration and only synchronize files. Current web apps are much more oriented to conflict-free synchronization. Markdown Tree also is.

Now if you can format branches in Markdown, drag & drop images and other files, keep documentation, study notes, code examples and simultaneously write information with a few more colleagues - that's quite useful I think.

Next version of Markdown Tree should support various embeds like: Youtube, codepen.io, Google maps, etc. That would allow to have a nice workspace for various kinds of tasks. And only web apps are capable of it too.

When someone does all those things, what are they making? That is what is the artifact or useful work? For example, a single Emacs org-file can produce calendar entries, a web page, source code files and/or administer a server. It makes stuff that is useful outside of org-mode or Emacs.

In a sense, it captures one of the *nix principles of outputting to conventional interfaces...it makes things rather than being an end in itself. If it had collaboration, people might use it to collaborate on writing a program or a web-page.

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