Saturday, November 26, 2016

Test stackedit

Evaluating Stackedit

I am looking for an open source a markdown editor running in a browser, for chrome/android.

Stackedit use nodejs at least for some features, but appears it can work offline. It can sync the local browser storage with Google Drive or a private CouchDB or Dropbox. It can publish to Blogger and github among other things - but no Gogs. Blogger support is interesting - I stopped using blogger in large part because of the editor, I write most of my notes in markdown in a private git repository, didn’t bother with setting up a convert/publish system - having it integrated may motivate me to cleanup and publish other random notes.

A docker image is provided that can run on a private domain, nodejs based. Seems to have some collaborative editing if using a CouchDB, including support for private CouchDB when using stackedit.io.

Seems to support frontmatter and a comments system - the comments get saved in a HTML comment, at the end of the document as “se_discussion_list:JSON”, containing ‘selectionStart/selectionEnd/comment[]’. Presumably this is integrated in the couch DB support and synced, but didn’t test it yet.

On google drive: the permissions allow it to add new documents to drive, create or open documents explicitly from drive - but it can’t see or access any other file. I assume dropbox is similar. Also seems to have a way to publish via ssh - so some random hosting site like dreamhost.


It can import/export local disk - but one file a time. Shouldn’t be a problem if files are saved to Drive, but still need to be opened in Stackedit one by one.

Table Supported
No auto-indent

So far I haven’t found a good markdown editor except Emacs orgmode that is good with tables.

For editing-in-chrome I also found Drive Notepad. Both Drive Notepad and Stackedit are based on ace.js - but Stackedit has more integrations with external storage, while Notepad only support Drive, and is much simpler/cleaner as a result. On the other side, Notepad supports most programming languages - as long as the source is stored in google drive.

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