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I'm becoming more interested in markdown and rest for documentation/requisites in projects, but some people in the team aren't that techie to use and remember these markups. It's going to be a bad move to just adopt them when they're used to OpenOffice files.

There is a visual editor for Latex, named Lyx, that is WYSIWYM and WYSIWYG, but I think Latex syntax is too complicated for this task (although the Lyx editor idea is exactly what I'm looking for).

But if there's a good looking editor for markdown/rest that they could use, this approach would be a good idea, using rest/markdown for documentation instead of *.odt files which is what we use by now. That way, I can commit, diff and do a lot of stuff with this documents, convert them to pdf, html and a bunch of different formats. They are just plain text files. Lyx does this to Latex, I'm interested in one that can do the same but for markdown/rest.

Anyone know if there are text editors that can accomplish this? I'm interested in Linux desktop variants.

If anyone have some experiences doing this move with non-techie people, please share your experiences.

Thanks!

(I know there are some solutions like wmd, but for web. What about a gnome desktop alternative?)

PS: I would like that these editors would just save .markdown files, and not a strange intermediary format.

Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
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  • I think a dedicated WYSIWYG editor would defeat the purpose of markdown. It's supposed to be so simple that you can just remember it. This being said, the latex code generated by lyx is pretty dirty, and hasn't always complied well when exported from lyx. So... no. Sorry :P – Mica Oct 25 '10 at 17:58
  • Yep, I know the purpose is to be simple. I would like to have an editor like the one we use at stackoverflow at least... you can have a gui and some buttons that "wrap" a word inside ****, but at the beginning, this is needed for non techie people. – Somebody still uses you MS-DOS Oct 25 '10 at 19:58

5 Answers5

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ReText editor (sf.net) is a simple text editor for Markdown syntax.

Ubuntu users (10.04 and higher) can install ReText via ppa:mitya57.

Review: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/03/retext-text-editor-that-supports.html

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type
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There's a visual studio plugin for that, but you're probably just better writing a script to translate the output OO files to html, then to markdown with a tool like Pandoc.

Alex M
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The best I've seen so far is a Gedit plugin. There's a plugin for markdown as well.

Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
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A detailed description of the following apps will cause this post to become very lengthy. So I will use the following codes to denote some common features: ​

  • G: GitHub Flavoured Markdown

  • M: Mathematical formual syntax support

  • L: Live Preview

  • C: Syntax highlighting for code

  • E: Export to various formats

  • S: Custom Styling i.e custom css for html etc.

  • P: Support for plugins

  • F: Free

  • D: Active development

Check out any of the following:

1. Remarkable

simple, elegant, feature-rich D F L G S P M C E(pdf, html)

2. ReText

simple, supports both restructured text and markdown D F M P E(html, odt, pdf)

3. UberWriter

minimal and lightweight F C M E(pdf html rtf)

5. Typora

simple, elegant F(while in beta) D G C M L E(html pdf epub docx odt etc.)

6. Haroopad

feature-rich, beta editor for blogging and mailing, import many formats F G L M E(html)

7. Mark My Words

simple F D L E(pdf html)

8. Gitbook Editor

For documentation, digital writing and publishing D F G L C M E(html pdf epub mobi)

9. Abricotine

editor based on web technology L F D G C E(html) M S

10. GhostWriter

simple, distraction-free, robust F G D E(html, other formats by extensions), S

11. Caret

minimal, robust D L G C E(pdf) M S

13. Elegant Markdown Editor (EME)

minimal, simple D L G C E(pdf) M

Charitoo
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If you have a Mac, there is a fork of Notational Velocity that does what you describe. (You might be able to use the source in a GNOME app if you feel like taking the time to do it yourself.)

Jared Updike
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