Show HN: Marksmith – a GitHub-style Markdown editor for Ruby on Rails

I'd use the Rhino Editor for that. It's based on TipTap and is very extendable. I used it in a few projects and loved it.

Yup. I agree. It's going to be hard to make a dent in the JS world, but it's coming back!

Thank you for your kind words. A rising tide lifts all boats!

Let's open an issue and discuss it there. I never used diagrams and that library, but if I see a couple of other implementations, maybe it can be a drop-in...

The JS side is made in StimulusJS. You can take it, it's MIT. I haven't worked with python and don't have plans to port it to React or anything else. If you do start work on it, I can guide you though the process if you need a hand...

It's common enough that a bigger percentage of normal people than you'd think probably find themselves using it on sites at least occasionally (Reddit, etc.), even if they don't consciously think of it as Markdown or know all the particulars of the syntax.

The GitHub-style editors are nice in that when a user sees the syntax directly when they press a formatting button in the markdown-toolbar-element, it makes associating a hash symbol with a headline or two asterisks surrounding a word with bold text pretty straightforward. In that sense, they teach you through using it since the syntax is fairly simple for the basics for someone seeing it the first time. Use it a couple of times, and you'll skip touching the buttons--at least for the basics.

That said, I think a Writebook-style editor[0] mentioned elsewhere may have some advantages for people with less computer experience, but I don't think a straight GitHub-style one like this is bad in those circumstances. It's quite good, especially if you pair it with some instructions (whether they be in a modal or whatever have you).

0. https://once.com/writebook

I've had good success teaching markdown to a fair few non-techie people. At the end of the day it better serves as a machine-readable middleground between a user-facing WYSIWYG (markdown-powered) editor and the server responding to it.

Why do you assume everyone prefers dark mode? :)

It’s hard to know how popular dark vs light is among people who work in tech, but in my anecdotal data the majority of people/coworkers I’ve seen use GitHub have it in light mode.

There may be an argument to default to “system”.

Any stats on how many people use dark mode in the OS vs light mode? My sense was that dark mode was less popular.