The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.
I built this in college, but the code is lost. It was a week or so of hacking. I believe in you.
IIRC the trick was to get a pipeline for Markdown to HTML, render it into a WYSIWYG editor, then convert the HTML to an AST, and walk that to generate the markdown. I had to “format” both the markdown and html on each render (bidirectional round trip render) because parsing/gen wasn’t whitespace stable.
It's not collaborative, but this is what I love about Typora[0]. Click into a styled area and the styling becomes visible. Click out, and you just see the final styling.
You can do that in IntelliJ. If there's a way to control a tab on a browser you could do that too. When I was writing my thesis, I would have `inotifywait` running on one side and when it detected the file had changed it would run the entire `pdflatex` + `bibtex` pipeline the 6 times or whatever it needed and Evince would hot-reload so I had a live preview. I'm sure a browser can do the same with some command.
HackMD already does this. It has a dual-pane view for raw markdown and formatted output, supports WYSIWYG editing, and allows real-time collaboration. Surprised no one mentioned it.
- [HackMD: Your Collaborative Markdown Workspace for Knowledge Sharing](https://hackmd.io/)
Isn't the point of Markdown that you don't need to 'see what you are generating', you can just read it? I write Markdown every day, but I do it in a plaintext editor (with syntax highlighting). I have a keyboard shortcut to view a preview in my browser, but I don't see a great need to be viewing that preview all the time.
Edit: I was wondering how to enable this mode because it wasn't in my qownnotes ,Here's how I found it , go to the help section , click find action , and search preview and click on show note preview panel.
Now the caveat is that if you want to see it blitted , you have to save the file once to see it automatically show in the other side.
Maybe this can also be definitely automated / I feel like there was some feature that did that for that as well or atleast its very non trivial.
Edit 2 : okay so I just realized that qownnotes also ships with autosave feature which saves and thus also shows what you type in reader mode in like a 0.5 second delay. And I think there is also a way to decrease / increase the autosave part as well
Dude , I didn't realize it , but qownnotes is so good!