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Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

Since the author seems to be in the comments, have you ever considered implementing a Typora-style live preview? (Typora, for those who don't know, hides the Markdown formatting as you type, and shows it again when you move the cursor back onto the text.)

Paper appears to have a more traditional split between text mode and preview mode, and you can't properly edit the formatting in preview mode (e.g., you cannot turn a heading back into normal text from preview mode).

I'm sure it's a pain to implement, but it's the one really killer feature of Typora that I can't live without.

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That would be a massive challenge and probably would lead to more bugs which is against my goal of having a low-maintenance product. The more dynamic is your text rendering, the harder it gets.

You can format from the Preview mode, by the way. You need to use the shortcuts for that or click inside the Format menu. If you put your caret on the line of the heading, then press Command+1/2/3 depending on the level of the heading it will convert the line back to normal text.

Fair enough. Thanks for the response!

As someone that implement this right now in my block editor[1] I must say it's a HUGE pain in the ass. Synchronizing the underlying plaintext/markdown with the rendered rich-text/HTML is a big undertaking. Especially so, since Qt's QML TextEdit conversion between its rendered HTML and Markdown is so inconsistent and broken. I've been thinking of ditching it, but I might persevere and continue to try.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

I totally get that.

I'm just one person, but for me, this was the feature that made me switch to a minimalist text editor for writing.

Otherwise, why not stick with Emacs? Plain text with light syntax highlighting is something Emacs already does fine, it's relatively distraction free, it has keyboard shortcuts I've already memorized forward and backwards.... The biggest downside is that I have to pop over to another window to get proper syntax rendering and to be 100% sure it's parsing the way I expect.

Anyway, just my two cents. I could totally understand it not being worth the effort to implement, but when it works, it's really nice.

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