StackEdit 4 beta preview

[benweet]

This is a dedicated ticket for any feedback on StackEdit 4 beta preview (https://stackedit-beta.herokuapp.com/).

Your feedback is much appreciated!

If you like it, say it. If you don't, or you haven't noticed any difference, say it. If you have any suggestion, I'm happy to hear it. If you just found a bug, declare a new issue.

If you like StackEdit, please give it 5 stars on the Chrome Web Store...

Cheers!

[Swader]

Not sure if this is because the beta is designed not to save settings, but if I deactivate Latex it's still on when the page refreshes. Other settings do save, like "Default content".

Suggestions:

1) Add the bottom menu (help, to-html, stats etc) to the top bar next to the comments part, or make it a floating widget draggable anywhere. The lower right is usually reserved for IM apps like Hangouts and access to stats (word count) is essential for myself and my writers. 2) Implement titlecapitalization.com into the title field

Edit: after writing a bit: the editor slows down drastically and there's a significant delay in key presses. It takes up to a second for a letter to show up after I hit a key now. The same issue is present in the current stable version. The more content there is, the bigger this lag. Articles of up to 2000 words take several seconds to show a character.

[benweet]

@Swader I've pushed (in version 3.99.2) some performance fixes and also implemented your draggable buttons idea. I think it's quite cool. I also extracted the stat number so that you can keep an eye on it (the first one is displayed, you just have to change the order in Settings>Extensions>Button "Statistics").

[Daniel-Hug]

The folders feature is HUGE! Thank you! The ability to drag & drop a file into a folder from the sidebar would make this much better I think.

I see the "manage documents" modal as a barrier-to-entry for manipulating files and folders. If you could expand the files and folders sidebar then you could add edit and delete icons to each file & folder and eliminate the added complexity of the modal / dialogue.

[Swader]

@benweet thanks, that flyout menu is super useful now! Another suggestion is remembering its position in localstorage so it re-appears in the same position next time the app loads

[HaiyangXu]

i wonder whether i can set the custom delimiters for mathjax ? I find that StackEdit's mathjax delimiter is not compatible with kramdown which used in github pages. What I actually expect is is there is a way i can use StackEdit compatible with github pasges .

[HaiyangXu]

BTW, Thanks for your excellent job, StackEdit is the most wonderful markdown editor i have ever seen.

[benweet]

@HaiyangXu MathJax delimiters are the one used on http://math.stackexchange.com. Though, you can customize them in Settings>Extensions>MathJax. AFAIK, GitHub pages is powered by Jekyll. My advice is to publish HTML directly (instead of markdown) to GitHub since Jekyll supports it and to add MathJax script in your template (see https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/11).

[HaiyangXu]

@benweet Thanks a lot ! I have set the delimiters， and now i think it works well.
I have another think about the editor is that may it can promote a dialog for commit message when publish to GitHub or let the GitHub commit message setting can support template,so it can automatically generate the desire commit message.

[willthong]

I absolutely love this! Improvements:

• Option to select font (or at least the option to change between serif / sans-serif in the editor)
• Coloured syntax (for instance, my bold text could be red or my headers could be pink)
• Greater theme options (so users can design their own themes)
• Distinctions between different levels of unordered list (e.g. * for first-level, - for 2nd level etc)

Seriously though, this is so impressive.

[noonsleeping]

Can not input english with Chinese input method, such as Microsoft Pinyin or Baidu Pinyin (http://shurufa.baidu.com/) on Windows 8.1

The input cursor is always out of focus when type 1 or 2 English Character.

[benweet]

@noonsleeping I can't seem to reproduce the problem but I'm really concerned about this issue. Can you open a new ticket and explain the step to reproduce? Thank you.

[nknote]

I'm Korean user. In MS Korean Windows 8.1 and Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m, some input characters are missing during typing. If you type sequentially 'rkskekfkakqktkdk' in Korean input mode, the string should be '가나다라마바사아' but it was '가나라사' or something different.

[benweet]

@yunraekim @noonsleeping Supposed to be fixed in version 3.99.5. Can you confirm that?

[nknote]

@benweet Thanks for your great job, it works like a charm!

[martin0258]

Acknowledgement & Feature Request

Thanks for the great job :+1: ! As a developer, I really like the support of UML diagrams!! Are you going to support other widely used UML diagrams such as class diagram?

[benweet]

@martin0258 unfortunately there is no client side library to handle plain text to class diagram conversion as for as I know.

[ghost]

Can you add tables and columns to the toolbar, please?

[bbhenry]

Just as I thought StackEdit has hit a plateau, beta 4 come out with EXCITING new features. I haven't tested them yet, but I absolutely love the UML and Flow chart feature. Man, I am going to play with it and write another blog post about StackEdit.

• The new font and design makes things easier to read and edit.
• It feels like the scrolling and everything else has been much smoother and faster.

[bbhenry]

A few things here.

• The shortcut setting tab under Settings is gone. That was a easy to use interface for setting shortcut keys.
• The url link is tailing right after the square bracket instead of creating separate numbered link at the bottom of the page.

[benweet]

@bbhenry Yes, I've changed the behavior of the link and image buttons because it was changing references all over the place and that was creating conflicts when trying to merge documents modified by different collaborators. For shortcuts, there is now a dedicated extension: Settings>Extensions>Shortcuts.

[bbhenry]

@benweet Can we get a full list of things that we can apply short-cut keys to in the Shortcuts extensions?

[benweet]

@bbhenry you can implement pretty much everything you can do with the UserCustom extension. However ACE is not used anymore and I haven't released yet the source code of the editor module. So if you are stuck let me know I can help (please create a new issue for that).

[bbhenry]

@benweet It would be nice if you can explain the decision of deprecating ACE in favor for something else in the release note. Is something else being used in the beta or is it all home grown now? Is that why I am experiencing the speed improvement?

[benweet]

StackEdit had a couple of issues with ACE (using the past tense because I hope I won't have to reconsider this decision):

• Fonts: only monospaced were usable, and even with monospaced fonts, there were issues with symbol characters and some alphabets.
• Spell checking: ACE doesn't support it natively. I had to include external dictionaries for spell checking and correction was not working properly.
• Mobile/tablet compatibility: I had to bundle a light version of StackEdit (using a lightweight textarea) for mobile devices because ACE doesn't work properly on those browsers.

More generally the choice not to use ACE in a lightweight editor is well described in @LeaVerou's thesis:

Using (ACE in this project is) a bit like using a chainsaw when only a knife is needed.

[RoyiAvital]

@benweet , Thank You. It is great.

I'd like to have some pre defined templates for the output HTML. I like the template used for the live view.

Thank You for this amazing Web App.

[shslave]

So exciting about the new features! And is there a plan to support Google Docs and Google Fonts?

[jimrosenberg]

It's nice having the New, Delete, and SyncAll buttons always available as in current version which seems to be changed in Beta (unless it's a setting I missed).

Current:

Beta:

[willthong]

Hi! Really like it. One problem: when I synchronise to Dropbox, characters like ê and č are changed. I think it's to do with UTF-8 encoding, but I've tried with both .md and .txt files encoded in UTF-8 and it happens anyway. Cheers!

[karolyi]

Hi,

are the sources for the beta available somewhere?

[benweet]

@karolyi nope, not released yet.

[corydeppen]

Definitely cleaner and the flyout drawer menus are nicer. The menu options related to sync and sharing are also more intuitive now I think. Still my favorite online markdown editor.

One issue I noticed is that my original markdown file (saved outside StackEdit) has an ordered list starting at the left edge of the document. The items in this list have an indented unordered list starting four spaces in. When I opened this document in StackEdit, it appeared as though the second level list items were indented twice as much as they should have been. In other words, the styling on the editor pushed the first level in, then pushed the second level in relative to the first, but they also included the four spaces in front of the second level items. When I removed the leading spaces and just inserted a line break and tab in front of the list items the layout straightened out in the editor. However, now when I open the document outside StackEdit I see that my leading spaces are now tabs.

I looked for a spaces vs. tabs setting but didn't see one. It seems StackEdit uses tabs instead of spaces. Would it be a feasible option to add?

[ejntaylor]

Tables to PDF not outputting correctly..

[cben]

Very impressive achievement for contenteditable! Some feedback on list handling:

2 space tabs?

Adding spaces in front of list seems to count as a deeper list level every 2 spaces. Shouldn't it be 4 for compatibility with all other markdown?

Pressing Tab inserts a physical tab which counts as one level but looks different from spaces in source. Specifically <tab>- item looks funny in Chrome — large gap between - and item. I don't suppose you have much control over how browsers draw a physical tab. Why not convert to spaces?

List auto-continuation is somewhat unpretty:

When you press Enter a new number/bullet appears but is not indented like the rest of the list, until I type something. Especially jarring with - bullets, in which case the preceding item is considered an H2! I can see how empty list items are not valid (or at least not well-defined) markdown and hiding that could be bad for users.

- foo
- bar
- 

parses as H2 in several engines (including Markdown.pl): http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=-+foo%0A-+bar%0A-+

But you could mitigate this by encouraging use of indented bullets (i.e. auto-prepend a space or 2 when you recognize a list item). With a space:

 - foo
 - bar
 - 

parses not exactly consistently but reasonably (and never as H2): http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=+-+foo%0A+-+bar%0A+-+ Your editor and preview both handle the later case as hanging "-" but not an H2. Lots of respect for being consitent on an edge case! Are you somehow using the same parser on both sides?

List continuation lines

Long text in list items (and quotes) wraps to beginning of line, which breaks the visual structure. Should be fixable with positive padding-left, negative text-indent?

If I want to continue the list item on another line (to work around the wrapping, because I'm just used to that style, or because I really need a multi-paragraph item), the editor doesn't help:

• It's pretty hard to insert: press Enter, backspace the bullet, type 4 spaces. It'd be nice if Shift+Enter did it for me. Personally, I'd prefer if Enter cycled continuation line -> new item -> end list, but that'd make short list writing slower and may not be to everyone's taste.
• The line looks indented less than the bullet above (just the spaces width).

---

Random idea (I did this in my codemirror-based editor): style all leading spaces, and bullets/numbers, in monospace. This lacks the satisfying jump you now have every time you cross a level, but makes it easier to see how your source is really indented.

[benweet]

@cben @corydeppen thx for your feedback. List items are auto indented with css padding in the editor, that's why spaces look like tabs. There shouldn't be any spaces/tabs conversion though.

[dogoku]

The new editor doesn't show the markdown code as written nor does it look like source code. It adds indentation and from what I read above, there are some issues with it.

In my opinion the source markdown should be rendered as is, with no changes, exactly as you are doing in the current version of StackEdit. is it possible to add the option to disable that new feature?

---

On a different topic, it would be nice to have separate themes for the editor and the viewer

[tullyliu]

Hope stackedit can support graphviz dot digram. this project (https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js/) has implementated to put Graphviz on the web.

[fye]

Beta 4 is very excellent! Thank you! I hava one suggestion： To export operation, can add a option, is to export one or more files and directories? It will be very helpful to me for writting programme documentation!

[emptymalei]

Thank you for this excellent tool. I like the new version.

Do you have plans of evernote integration?

[bbhenry]

@emptymalei lol, I have been asking for Evernote since the beginning. I would have helped if I am better at programming. There is a ticket for it.

https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/69

[ethernal]

Is there a way to track references (links etc.) synced between multiple documents (like a project)?

I am using this editor to create documentation and pandoc to generate ebook and pdf versions but when pandoc merges multiple docs into one they have duplicate references ex. to [1] since it's in every document that references something.

It would be nice to be able to track references across multiple files.

[jimrosenberg]

When I tab in a list it indents the text but not the item a level:

[benweet]

@jimrosenberg Fixed in 3.99.8. @cben @corydeppen @dogoku CSS auto-indent removed.

[BrendanThompson]

@benweet any chance of integration with GitHub? i.e. being able to save/sync to a repo/branch on repo?

[maqdev]

Hi!

Why if i export document with diagram text's doesn't fit boxes:

It's fine in edit preview:

[Ciki]

Hi, I just started using StackEdit and it blows my mind! :) However, I am missing one important feature for me - synchronize whole directory (with Drive or Dropbox) not just particular files. I am working in a team where everyone can create new wiki files & I'd like them to be imported as soon as they are created. Would that be possible to implement in next version?

[PerfectCarl]

For all the drawing hungry out there (@maqdev, @martin0258) you can check asciidraw or asciiflow

             +---------------------+           +-----------+
             |                     |           |    YES    |
             |  I love rectangles  +---------->|-----------|
             |                     |           |           |
             +---------------------+           |  But...   |
                                               |           |
                                               +-----+-----+
             +---------------------+                 |
             |                     |                 |
             |   Oh, well maybe I  |       +---------v---------+
             |   don't need UML.   <-------+  This is not UML  |
             |          :)         |       +-------------------+
             |                     |
             +---------------------+

[ahuigo]

Suggestion: hope it support paste image from clipboard.

[gxchen01]

@benweet

hi, benweet

In the current stackedit or stackedit 4, the style of code block and quote is the same.

I'd suggest that you gave them a different style.

we can see the difference of them here..

// this is a code block
if () {
} else {
}

this is a quote

[Swader]

@benweet been using the beta for a while now after the performance fix and I gotta say I am blown away at how good it works now. Are beta sources coming any time soon? I'd like to implement some of the optional features I talk about here: http://www.bitfalls.com/2014/05/the-state-of-markdown-editors-may-2014.html

[benweet]

@maqdev Should be fixed in 3.9.10. See https://github.com/benweet/stackedit/issues/415.