[Suggestion] Integrate better mardown editor

austintoddj / canvas

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http://trycanvas.app

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[Suggestion] Integrate better mardown editor #81

Closed karlmonson closed 8 years ago

karlmonson commented 8 years ago

I would love to see a better markdown editor integrated into this platform. Right now it's painfully difficult to write in markdown with the current text editor. Perhaps something like http://ghosditor.herokuapp.com/.

austintoddj commented 8 years ago

Good suggestion @karlmonson. Having a dual-pane editor and preview mode would sure be an enhancement. Currently yes, you can either paste your markdown into the </> code view in the WYSIWYG or you can just write it verbatim.

fergthh commented 8 years ago

:+1 to enhancement editor. But the ghosditor project is inactive since a year. I would suggest perhaps see a more active project such as Showdownjs.

Swader commented 8 years ago

Showdown is really good and easy to extend, we use it internally at SitePoint. It also plays well with PHP's commonmark if needed.

foxted commented 8 years ago

I just installed Canvas to use for my personal website, trying to write my first post, I noticed the editor feels really bloated.

I would suggest an editor in a Medium fashion, to be able to focus on writing. No need for font customization, alignment, etc... Just simple editor.

I will try to search see if I can find a decent Medium-like editor.

austintoddj commented 8 years ago

Great thoughts guys. Looking forward to seeing what we can do to improve the project as a whole. I agree, a minimal, strictly markdown editor would be far more appropriate for Canvas.

foxted commented 8 years ago

@austintoddj Are you open to pull-request on this? Seems like this library might be good for the job https://simplemde.com/.

austintoddj commented 8 years ago

@foxted Yes, that looks like an excellent solution. If you wanted to make a PR that replaced Summernote with SimpleMDE, I'd certainly pull it in.

austintoddj commented 8 years ago

UPDATE: Just created a develop branch in which I replaced Summernote with SimpleMDE. Looks nice so far, just a few more tweaks from here before we can merge. If any of you JavaScript ninjas want to take a stab at it, please feel free.

Outstanding issues:

The Full Screen feature works, but it sits right behind the navbar on top, causing some text to be hidden.
The Split Pane editor is doing the same thing, sitting behind the navbar.
The ? help button brings us to a new page with help topics. Can we just make the help topics pop up in a modal like the Summernote editor had?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

@foxted @karlmonson @fergthh @talv86 @RDelorier @tirjok

austintoddj commented 8 years ago

@karlmonson @Swader Hope you guys like the new Markdown editor, should be much more pleasant now writing with Canvas! :)

karlmonson commented 8 years ago

@austintoddj Thank you! Giving it a try now.