it generates an html preview in a sidebar.
the benefit over any other 2 column editor is that geany is a real text editor with lots of shortcuts, configs and tools. so the editing part is a lot better. markdown is just kind of tacked on though.
If by GUI you mean WYSIWYG, I don’t know of any! Very mysterious to me why this has not been properly taken on given the popularity of markdown.
Once every year or so I check out everything that’s available and try out any new or upgraded packages I can find. All have at least one of the following issues:
I never quite got it to work properly but Zettlr suits some people. You might be able to cobble something together in Codium. Both those have the bloat issue. There are some self hosted browser-based editors if you are interested in that sort of project. The best and closest I have found is Joplin but it isn’t actually a markdown editor. I wish someone would spin an editor off from its code base; surely the skeleton is there.
I used to use typora; it does have a really nice convert web->markdown. I think that it is done by some javascript or something because the other tools that have comparable quality I can think of off the top of my head are obsidian, joplin clipper and a couple of firefox extensions. I agree that in my experience pandoc and a couple other cli tools didn’t produce such nice results.
I also think in all those cases the browser is doing some of the work because it renders the page, discards a lot of irrelevant stuff, then you copy/convert just a selection portion of what’s visible. Whereas if you, for example, grab a raw html page through curl and send it to pandoc, none of that is done. You probably aren’t using Select All when you copy a page to typora, but pandoc would be faced with the entire page. I don’t know if there is a way to access the Reader View from the terminal but it would go a distance to cleaning up your pandoc conversion if you could start from there (for those sites on which it’s available).
I tried and failed to do the same thing but it’s not markdown’s fault. No matter how many bells and whistles markdown would get, the issue is in the conversion from html part.
Sorry I was trying to follow your meaning, because the example of absent rich text you gave was underlines. There is already basic text formatting support such as strong, emphasis, headings and links.
You could style any, all or none of those to have underlining. Whatever chosen rendering, they all have meaning independent from the applied style. What you are asking for is to have something that is purely a display style without any structural value. This is not coming to markdown any time soon. Hardly anyone uses underline as its own thing in html anymore, for good reasons.
Maybe this article will help to further explain.
Native SVG handling would be completely out of scope. The point of markdown is that it is supposed to be understandable in its plain text format. SVG is incompatible with that. The closest thing would be like mermaid charts but I think it’s quite a stretch even then.
I think you should just use HTML, it has a much larger array of tools that would suit your needs. Markdown is purposely constrained because it enables much more portability.
When I do free tech support for someone who I think could have solved it themselves I just make them solve it themselves by asking questions. “What information do you have?” “What have you tried?” “What does the error say?” “What do you think the error means? Is it giving a hint?” “When did you start having the problem?” “What can we eliminate?” “What did a search search suggest?” “What does the documentation say?”
“Did you try rebooting, reconnecting?”
My personal bias is being pro markdown. I do not know groff so below is based on some inferences on my part.
But I don’t think markdown is suitable for man pages, which contain specific kinds of information structured in a prescribed way. Markdown doesn’t and can’t know about these.
As I understand it, because of using a more sophisticated structure than MD, its possible to do things like:
That’s not rich text. Rich text is when a format is applied without structural reason.
You could have a markdown interpreter that displayed **this** *this* or _this_ using any arbitrary format. You could change the color, weight, border, drop shadow, opacity, mouse over effects, font face… Any attribute.
Lemmy has conventions but all * really means is emphasis.
If you want to save a website use html
Someone can correct this but iirc some implementations of markdown have image options like this:
Others put the size in { } after the main image item.
Rich text is contrary to the structural focus of markdown. Why should it be added?
There are a couple of apps on f droid that implement this with SMS.
The magic of reddit isn’t just the structure of the website, it’s the fact that there are so many people posting to diverse niche subjects. Although one structural thing lemmy is really lacking is the wiki and post flare components; those help give experts a reason to make effortful contributions as they do not fade into the ether after a few days.
That said, if reddit was new in 2025 or 2020, I don’t think it would take off as much. It gained popularity in a previous time of the internet and is now coasting off that.