[HN Gopher] GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor
___________________________________________________________________
GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor
Author : ekianjo
Score : 137 points
Date : 2021-02-24 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wereturtle.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (wereturtle.github.io)
| markosaric wrote:
| GhostWriter is amazing! I use it on Linux and write all my posts
| with it!
|
| Simple, minimal, lightweight, has a dark theme. There's a
| distraction free mode which basically fades out everything except
| for the sentence you are writing. And a Hemingway mode which
| disables the delete key :)
|
| I've gotten used to writing in Markdown since I started using
| GhostWriter as it makes that easy. For instance when I type "["
| it automatically adds "]" as well. Worth a try!
| bww wrote:
| This is great. Non-programming text editors (along with task
| management, notes, email, and others) belong to the broad class
| of software for which the options available on Linux are
| typically extremely unappealing. Especially in contrast to what's
| available on other platforms (notably: MacOS).
|
| Generally, your options on Linux consist of:
|
| - A couple apps that have been around and remain essentially
| unchanged since the '90s,
|
| - Some recent, well-meaning but poorly executed programs, and
|
| - A nice-looking but infuriatingly clunky and out-of-place
| Electron app which I'm loathe to use on principle.
|
| I'm very glad to see a first-class Linux app in this category.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| I've been happy with Notable, which is seeing rapid
| development. It went closed-source a while back, but still has
| decent linux support.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| There are always services like Notion to consider too. Cloud-
| based web-app, always available with zero need to install
| anything anywhere. Beautiful, mobile and tablet friendly
| writing. Move effortlessly between writing the same doc on your
| couch, desk, on the go, etc. Share and collaborate effortlessly
| with other people.
|
| A self-hosted open source option here if you can do some basic
| web-app setup and maintenance is HedgeDoc.
| mr-karan wrote:
| Notion is anything but "always available". There's no offline
| first mode available as of yet and within last 2 months alone
| there have 2-3 incidents of downtime.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Non-programming text editors
|
| That's quite a qualifier you have there - there's no meaningful
| distinction between a text editor and a non-programming text
| editor. You have older options like Emacs and Vim, newer
| options like VS Code and Atom, and a broad array in between
| like Geany, Textadept, Kate, Pluma, and on and on.
|
| In the non-programming text editor category you nonetheless
| have things like Joplin, Obsidian, Notable, and Boostnote. And
| of course web editors like Evernote, Notion, and Roam, plus
| TiddlyWiki, Dokuwiki, PmWiki, and so on in the wiki category.
| joelthelion wrote:
| Ghostwriter is awesome. I use it frequently and absolutely love
| it.
| auraham wrote:
| I just downloaded it a few minutes ago. Its GUI is clean and
| sharp. I am a big fan of Typora. It is my favorite app for taking
| notes and todo lists. I think GhostWriter is another good option.
| There are a few features I miss from Typora:
|
| - Creation of tables (CTRL + T) - Export to PDF - A bit of
| vertical space between a title (# title) and the next line of
| text. - Support for Latex equations
|
| A few things I like about GhostWriter
|
| - Support for multiple flavors of Markdown - Export to HTML -
| Many themes
| aidos wrote:
| We've started using Typora at work and my big complaint is that
| I can't pay them any money! I've sent them an email about it
| (months ago); so far, ignored.
|
| It's a bit crazy to me. As a business I want to know that the
| tools I'm building on are going to survive. Take. My. Money.
| purpmint008 wrote:
| What do you mean it isn't available for macOS?!
|
| I am an Apple user -- highest of all classes -- the whole world
| is supposed to develop software just for me.
|
| Oh well, I'll just have to SSH into my *nix box to test/use this.
| Raphael wrote:
| The cursor is blinking.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I recently discovered I can write great looking browser-ready
| documentation easily by simply embedding the whole page in a
| single PRE-tag and embedding a very simple style-sheet:
|
| <style> pre { font-family: Verdana; } </style>
|
| The reason it took me this long to not use HTML for writing
| simple texts I think is that the DEFAULT font for PRE in browsers
| looks terrible.
|
| Whatever else I need are simple tags like <b> <h2>, <h3>, <hr>
| and simple hyperlinks. I can omit <html> and <head> and <body>
| tags totally it seems. No problem not having them. Just nice
| simple MINIMAL MARKUP content-pages.
|
| But I can easily use the full power of HTML when needed. No need
| to rely on non-standard markdown dialects.
|
| Is there a specific advantage of Markdown I am missing?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Throw a CSS style tag in there pointing to a simple, semantic
| HTML & CSS library and you'd be amazed how slick and polished
| your page appears--try dropping in MVP.css for example:
| https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/
| asutekku wrote:
| The advantage is not having to write full html tags for example
| for lists (<ul><li>hi<li><ul>), when you can just use a single
| - to do the same thing and the text will also look readable on
| both pure text and as formatted.
| hughes wrote:
| If you're wondering, this is unrelated to the Ghost blogging
| platform, which uses a different markdown editor.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Anything different from using VSCode?
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Would love to try it. Am I overlooking the MacOS binary, do I
| have to build it from source?
| makeworld wrote:
| The README gives instructions. It says it's experimental
| though.
|
| https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter#macos
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Yeah I read that. Did you? It just says you can download an
| Application bundle, but provides no link.
|
| The only other reference to MacOS anywhere is how to build
| from source.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| Ah, dang it. I need something that's cross platform. This
| app is nice, but seems too Linux-centric.
|
| I use Joplin currently, it's kinda ugly, but works on all
| platforms including Android, and syncing it via Dropbox is
| trivial.
| sails wrote:
| What is an installation bundle? (tried some of the unix
| looking downloads but none seemed appropriate)
| stonesweep wrote:
| A bundle is basically what you see as an application in
| macOS launcher; under the hood, each app is actually a
| subdirectory with a bunch of things in it, which presents
| as a single-clickable in the GUI. I would interpret this to
| mean "manually sudo copy the (app directory) to
| /Applications, there is no installer" (download, untar and
| copy)
|
| For the releases, I don't actually see a published tarball
| for the bundle (on github) so I'm going to further think
| that they mean "...first you have to follow the compile
| instructions to create the output bundle (binaries)" - get
| Xcode installed, etc. and follow the second macOS readme.
|
| Better answer on bundles:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_(macOS)
| sails wrote:
| Thanks that made sense.
| kartoshechka wrote:
| goyo and limelight can provide (less dramatic) distraction-free
| experience on vim, and even without searching I'm sure there's
| something for previewing Markdown from vim.
| ibraheemdev wrote:
| Vim displays plaintext, so you cannot use it to preview
| markdown as HTML. However, you can use a plugin such as
| "markdown-preview" [0] to preview markdown in your browser.
|
| 0: https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim
| podiki wrote:
| Looks nice! And I don't want to always be that Emacs guy, but for
| anyone interested, you can (of course) have a similar setup,
| here's some packages:
|
| https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs (haven't tried, but clean
| look and defaults)
|
| https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti (writing environment)
|
| https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode (screenplay writing)
|
| https://github.com/alphapapa/org-sidebar (sidebar)
|
| https://github.com/jrblevin/markdown-mode (markdown, with preview
| too)
|
| https://orgmode.org/ (of course, org-mode for everything)
| beshrkayali wrote:
| Olivetti is fantastic, I mostly edit and write text in that
| mode, even longish emails.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| And I don't wanna be that Vim guy, but similarly a mix of these
| plugins works well for me:
|
| https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim (distraction free mode)
|
| https://github.com/reedes/vim-pencil (better behaviour for
| writing prose)
|
| https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim (visual highlighting
| of current paragraph)
|
| https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown (better markdown
| syntax)
|
| https://vim-voom.github.io/ (outliner sidebar)
|
| Edit:
|
| BTW, for my truly favourite aesthetic experience, I like to
| pair this setup with a nice dark theme, a high quality font,
| and cool-retro-term (https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
| term/) emulating an old school CRT. Is this practical or
| ergonomic? Nope! But I love it!
| jyrkesh wrote:
| It might be blasphemous, but I'd actually love a pretty,
| distraction-free Markdown editor like this that supports Vim
| keybindings, but isn't Vim.
|
| Am I just being lazy in learning the Vim plugin system? Are
| there pretty Vim frontends now that render all nicely like
| Ghostwriter et al?
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Well, without knowing what your definition of a "pretty"
| frontend is, it's a bit tough to reply.
|
| Go check out the screenshots for Goyo and Limelight and ask
| yourself if it's pretty enough for you. Personally, I think
| Vim can look as good as any modern editor with a couple
| plugins and a decent theme and font, but we might not have
| the same standards. :)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Most dedicated markdown editors all end up using the same
| JS code editor components like Ace, CodeMirror or Monaco,
| and those editors have great vim keybindings usually as
| extensions or options. See if the tool you're using lets
| you flip those vim bindings on. For some editors they
| expose it as an option and for others you have to hack
| around with the source (for example enabling it with
| stackedit, a PWA markdown editor like ghostwriter, is
| possible with some hacking:
| https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/254 ).
| podiki wrote:
| Haha fair enough! Retro term definitely looks cool.
|
| (Of course could then use Evil in Emacs for Vim keys, or just
| run vim in a terminal inside Emacs...)
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Honestly, I've periodically considered heading back to
| Emacs-land to see how things have changed.
|
| I used to be an Emacs user back in the early 2000s but
| Emacs pinky hit me something fierce (it's my own fault; I
| have poor typing style so I never use the right control,
| and I could never adapt to the control-capslock swap) so I
| jumped into Vim and never looked back.
|
| But I gotta admit, Orgmode, among other things, has me
| feeling a bit Emacs-curious these days... ;)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Give Doom emacs or Spacemacs a shot too--it's the power
| of emacs with an opionated vim style keybinding. They're
| really slick in my experience.
| elwell wrote:
| I've enjoyed using this simple Emacs package:
| https://github.com/shime/emacs-livedown
| [deleted]
| thangalin wrote:
| My free and open-source KeenWrite text editor is comparable to
| GhostWriter:
|
| https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite#features
|
| What sets KeenWrite apart is the ability to use (externally-
| defined) variables within the prose, shown in this older demo
| video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8
|
| Also, variables work in diagrams, R expressions, and TeX
| equations. For example, take a look at the following screenshot:
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/maste...
|
| The palette is defined in one spot, allowing colours to be used
| by both diagrams and typesetting the final PDF. Further,
| character names can be assigned and referenced within both the
| prose and diagrams. Also, the variables are interpolated, which
| allows variables to be defined in terms of other variables.
|
| Are there any other text editors that have interpolated variable
| references? (I looked, but didn't find any, so started developing
| my own text editor.)
| swirepe wrote:
| This is beautiful. Well done.
|
| >Are there any other text editors that have interpolated
| variable references?
|
| The closest I can think of are Frescobaldi's snippets[1], vim's
| `!read`, or spreadsheets. Maybe light table [2]? I haven't seen
| anything exactly like what you've made
|
| [1] https://www.frescobaldi.org/uguide#help_snippet_edit_help
|
| [2] http://lighttable.com/
| breuleux wrote:
| > Are there any other text editors that have interpolated
| variable references?
|
| I made my own markup language a while back that sort of has
| that feature
| (http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/syntax.html#variables). The
| variables can be defined inline or imported from a JSON file or
| whatever. It does reparse the whole thing on every change, so
| I'm not sure it scales very well. The language should be
| amenable to incremental parsing, though, I just haven't had
| time to tackle that issue. It's far more extensible and far
| better than Markdown IMO, but I suppose I'm biased.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Most people get this kind of logic from their CMS or publishing
| platform. Jekyll, hugo, wordpress, 11ty, etc. all have various
| external state stores (yaml files, JSON, CSV, calling a graphql
| API, etc.) that you can query and interpolate or insert data
| into your document using a bevy of different template
| languages. Check out Gatsby or even Next.js for something
| that's really pushing the boundaries of static + data-driven
| content.
| e12e wrote:
| > Are there any other text editors that have interpolated
| variable references?
|
| Maybe Leo? I'm not sure if it qualifies as a (plain) text
| editor, but then maybe neither does keenwrite.
|
| http://leoeditor.com/
|
| Or you could pair markdown with m4 - but I wouldn't really
| recommend it.
| underseacables wrote:
| Another great editor is iA Writer which has a wonderful Focus
| Mode and a color scheme that is rather pleasing and easy on the
| eyes.
| satysin wrote:
| Yes iA Writer is great. I love the new Style Check feature. I
| don't write much but when I do features like focus mode and
| style check really help me output a decent to read document.
|
| Something I like is that everything is in plain text and it
| just uses iCloud for sync rather than trying to do its own
| thing. Or you can just use Dropbox or whatever else you want as
| it is just text files in a folder which I always prefer over a
| database and proprietary syncing solution.
| nafizh wrote:
| Not available for linux sadly.
| pierreyoda wrote:
| The iOS version is also great!
| r053bud wrote:
| Just curious what differentiates this from the dozen others out
| there?
|
| Edit: Open source for one, I would say.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| GhostWriter is more basic than others, which some may consider
| a good thing. I tried it on Arch for a bit since there is a
| package in the official repos.
|
| I however prefer just using Atom with Markdown Preview Plus. It
| has a ton of features built in with sane extensions, or you can
| integrate it with Pandoc:
|
| https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus/blob...
|
| I'm sure VS Code has something similar, but only from non-
| trusted third parties.
| schnable wrote:
| Anything similar out there for Asciidoc? Currently using the VS
| Code plugin.
| recklessdemon wrote:
| I believe you can use Pandoc with Ghostwriter. Pandoc has
| support for Asciidoc.
| dschuessler wrote:
| Visual Studio Code has a Zen mode (Cmd+K Z) that should at
| least give you the distraction freedom of GhostWriter,
| regardless of the markup you use.
| smusamashah wrote:
| This looks great. We have too many markdown editors now BTW and
| none of them provide WYSIWYG like Typora. We really need an open
| source Typora clone.
| svat wrote:
| "Mark Text" (https://marktext.app/) seems to be one.
|
| (HN thread from Nov 2019:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21462832 -- I asked for
| other editors like this and got no other answers AFAICT. So
| this Mark Text is still the only open-source "WYSIWYG" Markdown
| editor I'm aware of.)
| msoloviev wrote:
| I'm actually working on one
| (https://github.com/blackhole89/notekit). It's native
| (Gtk+/C++) rather than Electron, too.
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Looks very nice, will give it shot over weekend. Curious for
| new GTK app and the tree/folder structure is helpful to me.
| Thanks!
| uneekname wrote:
| This looks like the tool I've been looking for, and the
| screenshots in your README are beautiful. Thanks for the work
| you've done on this, I'm excited to try it out.
| digitalsanctum wrote:
| +1 for Typora. It's my go to for Markdown editing especially
| when I'm authoring tables. I don't mind it being closed source
| and it's free.
| baby wrote:
| What's the point of a WYSIWYG markdown editor? FWIW quip is
| one. The only thing I can think of is that if you need to post
| something you wrote on a platform that accepts markdown it
| makes it easy. But in general I write markdown when I don't
| have google doc or quip
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It's a mindset change--make writing flow as freely and easily
| as typing up a reply in gmail. Think about how many
| paragraphs you can bang out quickly getting a point across in
| gmail's editor. It doesn't feel like you're authoring content
| in a CMS, but if you squint that's really what gmail kind of
| is--just a CMS for writing content directed to a small (or
| large) set of people through direct e-mail as opposed to
| published on a web page.
|
| You're not in a fancy CMS editor with all these whiz-bang
| blocks and components--those are just noise that give you
| more anxiety (should I be making this paragraph a hero/lead
| element? wait no, what about a side-by-side with a graphic?
| oh, but what graphic? ... hrm, time to go waste 30 minutes
| looking at unsplash... oh wait, what was I writing again? oh
| nevermind, I guess I'll come back to finish this tomorrow
| when my head is clear).
|
| You're not writing content in something that feels like a
| programming language filled with special characters, an IDE
| yelling at you for every little misplaced indent or space,
| etc.
|
| You're just writing text with some light formatting to
| emphasize structure and key elements. Maybe some lists or
| bullet points thrown in. A graphic figure or two. It's just
| like composing an e-mail, something you've done thousands and
| thousands of times already in your life. There's no pomp and
| circumstance, no steep learning curve... just writing.
| c-smile wrote:
| Why it is so big? Download shows 79 Mb of compressed installer.
| What's inside?
|
| My html-notepad (https://html-notepad.com/) (Sciter based) that
| allows to edit documents in as WYSIWYG as Markdown forms is just
| 2 Mb ( also compressed installer ) - 40 times smaller.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It seems to come with its own fonts:
| https://github.com/wereturtle/ghostwriter/tree/master/resour...
| sodality2 wrote:
| Less than 200KB each, doubt that's the bulk of it
| c-smile wrote:
| I suspect that they package whole WebKit for HTML preview
| and so it positions Qt not too far from ElectronJS.
| baby wrote:
| Now do the same for asciidoc as this is what book writers use,
| and make it easy to export to epub, and you have a product that
| will be used by the next generation of self publishers
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| Any Joplin users here? How does this compare to Joplin? (besides
| being less supported on different platforms)
| stanislavb wrote:
| And here it is a summary of the alternatives (there are plenty):
|
| - Open Source https://www.libhunt.com/r/ghostwriter
|
| - Commercial https://www.saashub.com/ghostwriter-alternatives
| tyingq wrote:
| Looks like the Windows support is provided by a third party that
| isn't able to produce windows installers past the 1.8.0 version.
| I had to search around a bit to find that one, so a direct link
| for anyone that wants the 1.8.0 Windows x64 installer package:
|
| https://github.com/michelolvera/vs-ghostwriter/releases/down...
|
| He does provide a 7-zip portable binary for 1.8.1+.
|
| I did download and try it briefly. It has a wordpad-like feel,
| pulldowns for bold, italic, indent, lists and so on. Seemed
| pretty nice to use.
| ducktective wrote:
| For anyone wondering, no, _not_ Electron this time! It uses QT5
| actually so +1 there.
|
| (Sad to see the state of desktop GUI has come to this...)
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Is Electron falling out of favor?
|
| It's been next on my "to learn" list for way way too long.
| ngokevin wrote:
| It's a great dev experience, and lets you build desktop
| applications to users fast. Some purists on HN may jab at it
| because they know the internals that it ships a whole browser
| engine, and resource and performance-wise is not optimal.
| It'll be the similar crowd of people who shun JS frameworks
| for vanilla JS.
| bayindirh wrote:
| No, Electron is not falling out of favor, but there's a
| strong opposition for it from some parties, which I'm a
| member of.
|
| Make no mistake, Electron is awesome stuff, but it consumes
| too much memory and processing power for what it can do.
|
| Atom, the poster child of Electron uses as much RAM as
| Eclipse and can't do 10% of a stock Eclipse installation.
| When I left it, Atom was unable to open large files, do lazy
| loading or similar simple stuff.
|
| Other Electron based software also wastes too much resources
| for the functionality it offers. This is where it gets the
| most flak.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I'd put up Slack or Discord as the modern exemplars of
| Electron apps. As much as I loved Atom it has clearly been
| de-prioritized and on the verge of being shelved by GitHub
| & Microsoft. Yeah Slack and Discord take a few hundred MB
| of memory, but for thousands and thousands of people they
| sit there hanging out in their desktops all day every day
| with very little fuss. You don't need to install a JVM to
| use them, you don't need to worry about keeping it
| updated... it just works. Whether you're on linux, mac or
| windows... again, it just works. I can walk my parents
| through installing and using Slack over the phone--I cannot
| do that for nearly any other desktop app.
| ducktective wrote:
| So you are willing to trade ~1GiB of your RAM and ~5% of
| CPU cycles just to be able to send/receive some text
| messages? I use those services only in their webapp form
| and even then, my laptop grinds to a very noticeable halt
| as soon as they are loading in the tab.
|
| Electron is a nice cross-platform solution until it
| isn't. Imagine using VSCode, Discord, Slack, Matrix,
| Spotify, some markdown editor and now you have 6 browser
| instances chipping away your machine resources...not even
| counting the actual browser.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| We're living in a world where my 2 year old phone has 8GB
| of DDR4 RAM. Even a $150 Chromebook has 4GB. RAM
| consumption just isn't a realistic concern anymore for
| office and communication work, much like hard drive space
| is basically infinite for most people.
| Mavvie wrote:
| > So you are willing to trade ~1GiB of your RAM and ~5%
| of CPU cycles just to be able to send/receive some text
| messages?
|
| Yes. Also, I'm curious, do you find the webapp forms use
| measurably less resources than the electron version? I
| would've imagined they're pretty close (with Electron
| possibly even being lighter than a full browser tab), but
| I am not confident and could be completely wrong.
|
| > Imagine using VSCode, Discord, Slack, Matrix, Spotify,
| some markdown editor and now you have 6 browser instances
| chipping away your machine resources
|
| I, and surely tons of others on this forum, am doing this
| right now without issue.
|
| Sure it's not perfect, especially if you're on battery,
| but most of the time it just doesn't matter to almost all
| of their user base.
| ducktective wrote:
| The reasoning is, since those are "web"-apps at the core,
| I saw no reason to complicate my OS package manager with
| a chrome-instance (bar VSCode). The whole install-use-
| update could be replaced by opening a tab. I've used
| Postman as a desktop app and the performance was subpar.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I, and surely tons of others on this forum, am doing
| this right now without issue.
|
| I personally run Teams, Spotify, Evernote and Discord,
| but I close them as soon as finish working with them. So
| _without issue_ is a bit of a stretch. Also These
| applications glitch in a funny, agonizing and obscure
| ways. They are non-deterministic blobs and this is not
| good.
|
| > Sure it's not perfect, especially if you're on battery,
| but most of the time it just doesn't matter to almost all
| of their user base.
|
| Actually, when computing is moving on portables in an
| ever increasing speed, this sounds bad. "It's a nice
| application, but it just kills your mobility. It's not
| important anyway, eh?"
|
| I don't think the approach of "we have a lot of
| processing power and its processor is efficient anyway,
| so let's abuse this" is a good way to approach software
| development.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| There is enormous pressure on web engines to improve
| efficiency and decrease battery/power spend. With
| browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better equipped
| to actively manage and spin down idle tasks. Folks get
| 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running tons of
| Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc. all at
| once.
|
| The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt app
| that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire core
| while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this is a
| knock on complex native app development, not Qt).
| bayindirh wrote:
| > There is enormous pressure on web engines to improve
| efficiency and decrease battery/power spend.
|
| Yes. However, these efficiencies are not always translate
| to better Electron or WebApps on desktop applications.
|
| > With browsers and JS sandbox VMs they are much better
| equipped to actively manage and spin down idle tasks.
|
| If your code doesn't allow these idle tasks to spin down,
| all this work is effectively moot.
|
| > Folks get 20+ hours of battery now on M1 macs running
| tons of Electron apps like Slack, Discord, VSCode, etc.
| all at once.
|
| This is possible because of the process suspension
| capabilities of macOS. Not efficiencies of the
| applications themselves completely. Evernote is the 6th
| most power hungry application on my M1 MacBook Air, First
| two is Zoom and Skype. Third one is Safari. I run Teams
| and Discord only on my desktop, so I've no 12hr power
| statistics for them for now.
|
| > The reality is it's far, far easier to write a bad Qt
| app that sits in busy wait loops locking up an entire
| core while refreshing UI and destroys your battery (this
| is a knock on complex native app development, not Qt).
|
| Qt's QML simplifies this stuff tremendously. You can
| write a whole UI in Qt in five lines with QML, without
| thinking about any of this stuff, while keeping
| everything native and nice.
| philote wrote:
| What is there to gain using the Electron versions of
| Slack/Discord vs the web versions?
| omniscient_oce wrote:
| They have access to the file system and OS apis
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| They sit in the background and pop up alerts in your
| native OS notification center. They can start up
| automatically when you login. You can't accidentally
| close them when shutting down a browser. That's about it,
| honestly (Discord is a little more special since it needs
| native access to see and capture games being played).
| bayindirh wrote:
| There are some well optimized Electron apps, I agree
| however, they can be implemented in a much better and
| more native way, without being harder to install and/or
| update. Qt is a possible alternative. Similarly WxWidgets
| can do it.
|
| As a big fan of compiled, so-called proper programming
| languages (and high performance code developer to some
| extent), I can tell that JVM is being bashed
| unnecessarily. JVM _was_ heavy, I agree. Since the age of
| Intel Core _i series_ , JVM is no longer heavy.
|
| I use one of the heaviest JVM applications regularly:
| Eclipse. It can run in circles around any of the Electron
| apps with similar memory usage, and I get much more bang
| per MB in Eclipse. In ~1GB I can keep 3 IDEs open with
| plethora of files, daemons, tools and integrations. We
| have in-place updaters for a lot of platforms. Mac has
| sparkle. Linux's AppImage can update itself seamlessly.
|
| There's no guarantee that an Electron application targets
| everything out of the pipeline. We still don't have an
| official Evernote client for Linux. Spotify for Linux is
| a _volunteer project_ inside the company (which had a
| very painful and bloody teething too). Slack just hogs
| your computer. I didn 't look to resource usage of
| Discord, but it's not light I presume.
|
| On the update department again, I've found out that
| Office for Mac has updated itself _again_ and I didn 't
| notice. Same for Firefox.
|
| So Electron is a nice solution, for some stuff, but it
| leans too much on "Hardware is cheap, network is
| reliable" paradigm, which is flat out wrong.
|
| It's very cheap to build on Electron, but user pays the
| price. There's always the price. It all depends who's
| going to pay it at the end of the day.
| purpmint008 wrote:
| I just use Chrome's "Create Shortcut" feature to make my
| web-apps instead of downloading a bloated Electron app for
| the same thing.
| geoelectric wrote:
| It's been controversial from the start. It's essentially
| using a browser engine in the same way as Java uses the JVM
| runtime, so all the performance arguments against that apply
| to Electron too--probably even more so given that the JVM is
| specifically optimized to be used that way whereas Blink/V8
| is not.
|
| Personally, I think the idea of a cross-platform application
| runtime with GUI capabilities is a good one, browser-based or
| otherwise. The only real problem is every app needing its
| own, rather than using some sort of shared (but partitioned)
| app subsystem based around a central browser engine. I think
| the Chrome apps were supposed to be essentially that, but
| didn't work out. That said, Chrome basically treats every tab
| as a separate browser instance, so Electron really isn't as
| bad as all that compared to a browser-based app.
|
| The problem is everyone compares it to native, not
| acknowledging the dev's choice was probably Electron vs. no
| support off the dev's main OS (usually Windows), rather than
| Electron vs. native support for Mac or Linux. I still
| remember when you had to have Windows to run most of the
| interesting productivity and development apps, so I'm pretty
| OK with extra overhead in exchange for the expanded support.
| arkwin wrote:
| I love this, I usually write my notes in Atom for school (I know
| overkill) but I sometimes takes screen shots of slides for my
| notes and never had a good way to view everything together.. this
| works!
| protomyth wrote:
| What I would really like is an editor where I can fix the cursor
| line on the screen and have the document move around that line. I
| hate looking at the bottom of the window all the time when
| writing long documents.
| txutxu wrote:
| Me too.
|
| What I do in my ~/.vimrc is: " Number of
| lines (context) around the cursor " You may like 3, or
| 5, or 10 " A high number keeps the cursor in the middle
| of the editor set scrolloff=999
|
| Then... it's always in the middle of the screen/window, even
| when working at really big resolutions.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| This is why I like rich text editors like google docs instead
| of IDEs jammed with markdown extensions. Rich editors come from
| a lineage of word-processing tools that are first and foremost
| for writing paragraphs of text and content. They go out of
| their way to make the experience of reading and writing
| pleasant, not mechanical.
| ducktective wrote:
| In vim, set `scrolloff` to a large value.
|
| https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Keep_your_cursor_centered_vertic...
| protomyth wrote:
| close, but I want it to stay about a quarter of way down the
| screen.
| txutxu wrote:
| This can be done playing with a number of lines... like 10
| or 15. And it will stay at such distance (in lines) from
| the top or bottom...
|
| Don't know a way to set it to a percent, but could be nice
| too, indeed.
| ducktective wrote:
| I think the percentage is do-able with some autocmd
| shenanigans...even the link I posted has a snippet for
| it.
|
| Changing that `/2` to a `*3/4` might work.
|
| https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Keep_your_cursor_centered_ver
| tic...
| y2bd wrote:
| iA Writer has a "typewriter" mode that behaves like that.
| alphachloride wrote:
| I personally think the point of markdown is that any text editor
| becomes distraction-free. Everything to do with structuring
| content is inline with the text. How that structure is displayed
| is deferred to the rendering context.
|
| I like the feature set, by the way.
| c-smile wrote:
| Well, Markdown is a form of WYSIWYG strictly speaking. Poor man
| WYSIWYG if you wish.
|
| This * list item 1 * list item 2
|
| mimics final representation of bullet list and so do pretty
| much all other syntax constructs of Markdown.
|
| The only benefit it gives for the user (if to compare with
| typical WYSIWYG) is a simplification of caret positioning.
|
| Consider these MD construct:
| _italics_**bold**
|
| In MD you can easily put something in between these two words
| or modify words themselves. But in case of "tru-WYSIWYG" you
| will have this situation:
| <i>italics</i><b>bold</b>
|
| with just one caret position between italics and bold. In fact
| there are three possible caret positions (on edges of words and
| between) but no WYSIWYG editor allows you to do that.
| napworth wrote:
| Does it handle Fountain syntax too?
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