Comment by QML | Hacker News Reader

Comment by QML | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know if it's possible to give Markdown and LaTeX first-class support in ProseMirror? Having only regex-based shortcuts does not achieve that.

What I mean is if you typed bold, let it turn into a bolded word, and then decide to edit the word itself, it should be surrounded by bold again instead of defaulting to ctrl-b due to content-editable. The same goes for LaTeX with $$ decorators.

I find this more natural when writing with Markdown and LaTeX than having to click the menu bar and inserting a math formula or whatnot. I think the best editor I found so far that does this is Typora, but that library is not open-source. There is an open-source library very close to it called Marktext, but that has a few annoying bugs and only has 1-2 developers.

So I'm wondering if ProseMirror is the mature library for me?

Edit: Ok, HackerNews only renders italtics which makes writing a bit annoying. The bold was initially surrounded by two * on both sides.

Frankly, I have yet to find a good Markdown editor period, regardless of whether it's open/closed source or whatever. As far as I know all the Markdown editors I'm aware of only support subsets of the syntax in e.g. Pandoc, so I keep hitting edge cases where my document won't render properly. In the better editors, they at least don't mess with the parts of the document they don't understand, so you can edit with (relative) safety as long as you don't need to touch the unsupported sections. But some editors, the process of loading/saving isn't lossless, so you can't even edit such documents. The editor from texts.io is a big offender here.

I just took Typora out for a spin, and it looks pretty good except it doesn't understand soft line wrapping. So if you have a document with something like:

    Some paragraph text
    6. that happens to be broken with a number in front.

Then it interrupts the paragraph and makes a list. But at least in my initial tests it seems to be lossless, so it at least won't mess with existing formatting too badly.

Yeah, Typora is still in beta last time I checked so minor issues like that are expected. Just open up an issue on their Github issue page.

Hm, for me Pandoc has worked pretty well for converting .md to .html. Is it the specific flavor of Markdown that you are using (I use Github flavored Markdown)?

I use Pandoc with Pandoc's dialect of Markdown. My issue isn't in the final conversion step, it's that if I use an editor that isn't careful to preserve syntax it doesn't understand then the Markdown syntax itself may get messed up when loading/saving the file. Historically I haven't been able to trust any native Markdown editors so I just use Emacs and edit in the raw format. But Typora looks promising and I may try to see how far I can get with it.

Check out https://laobubu.net/HyperMD

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