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squidfunk / mkdocs-material

Documentation that simply works
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/
MIT License
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Preview: Live Edit – Feedback wanted! #2110

Open squidfunk opened 3 years ago

squidfunk commented 3 years ago

I just threw a POC together running the visual part of the Material for MkDocs stack in-browser. This would omit the need to install anything via pip or docker, as tech writers could just use the in-browser live editor to instantly preview their changes:

screenshot-localhost-8080-1607899586028

I'm astonished myself how fast this is. A live video showing the instantaneous rendering can be watched here: https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1338252230265360391

Any feedback is appreciated. Would you consider this useful? How would your ideal workflow look like?

squidfunk commented 5 months ago

If there is any chance that you could consider opening up your backend implementation to third party clients, or at least try to keep third party clients in mind - that would be awesome. Any level above zero would be well appreciated. I know that this is nothing small or simple to ask for, but asking is free... right? 👼

I haven't really started working on this besides the prototype I showed, which allows to translate Markdown to HTML in-browser, i.e., is a live side-by-side preview, nothing more. I will share progress here, once we start working on it ☺️ I'm still pretty busy with #6307, making good progress and try to keep the focus, because you know how it is: working on too many complex topics at the same time is quite impossible to pull off. This is also why there are rather few new additions to Insiders and not too much noise on the community edition right now. As mentioned, we'll start evaluating everything that was discussed here later this year.

By the way, I have seen that you're working on MkDocsEditor and yet have to check it out ☺️ I'm not an Android dev or user, or a customer of JetBrains, so I'm not sure I can somehow make this work.

shaedrich commented 4 months ago

How would your ideal workflow look like? […] A Visual Studio Code plugin, i.e. like Markdown Preview, but using Python markdown and rendering in Material's style. It could also pull in your extra CSS files and apply your changes / overrides.

I use the Markdown preview in VSCode and it works in most cases, but not in all, since it is not Python Markdown and doesn't have its extensions. Namely, in one project, we work with code block snippets and it would tremendously help to verify:

Auto-completing file paths would be nice too, but I suppose, that would be a whole different story.

adfrancis commented 1 month ago

Really really looking forward to this feature above all... i love the platform and want to adopt it within my team (military) but the lack of in-browser editing holds me back.. my guys just wont adopt the traditional edit, commit, push model for a documentation platform. Keeping my eyes peeled!

squidfunk commented 2 weeks ago

We have an update on the live editor in our latest blog post. It's most likely not going to look like the proof of concept I posted here, but we're currently evaluating alternative ways of improving the editing experience for large projects. The challenges and problems we're facing are explained in the post 🤟

Note that this does specifically address the side-by-side editor. WYSIWYG is a whole problem of its own, which we'll also look into once we solved the major road blocks that we encountered. We see WYSIWYG as a cornerstone of making Material for MkDocs available throughout entire organizations for less technically versed users.