DIY GNOME Environment Markdown Editor

This is a script that makes a simple “Markdown editor” that’s a gedit window, and a md-fileserver program, that, together, work like editors like Apostrophe.

One window is for editing.

The other is a preview.

Save it into md-edit, and do a chmod u+x md-edit to make it an executable command. Note that it uses zsh, not bash, so you need zsh installed.

This program automatically creates a document in “MarkdownNotes”, so I can create notes without naming the file. I realize this isn’t everyone’s use case, and I’m just presenting this as an example.

#! /usr/bin/zsh

# Markdown editor setup using md-fileserver

if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    F="Untitled-`date +%Y-%m-%d`-$RANDOM.md"
    mkdir -p ~/Documents/MarkdownNotes
    cd ~/Documents/MarkdownNotes
else
    F="$1"
fi

touch "$F"

gedit "$F" &

echo 
echo Uses: https://github.com/commenthol/md-fileserver
echo 
echo URL to view the doc
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/`pwd`/$F
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/`pwd`/
echo
echo Settings
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/config
echo
echo Confluencer docs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/confluencer
echo
mdstart -c "$F"

#! /usr/bin/zsh

# Markdown editor setup using md-fileserver

if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    F="Untitled-`date +%Y-%m-%d`-$RANDOM.md"
    mkdir -p ~/Documents/MarkdownNotes
    cd ~/Documents/MarkdownNotes
else
    F="$1"
fi

touch "$F"

gedit "$F" &

echo 
echo Uses: https://github.com/commenthol/md-fileserver
echo 
echo URL to view the doc
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/`pwd`/$F
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/`pwd`/
echo
echo Settings
echo
echo http://localhost:4000/config
echo
echo Confluencer docs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/confluencer
echo
mdstart -c "$F"

I wrote this post in md-edit

You can usually copy-paste Markdown into WordPress, and it’ll automatically format it the same way. gedit is way faster than the WordPress block editor.

Other Markdown Editors I like

Obsidian – the best editor, is also a note-taker, outliner, and knowledge graph editor. Has great renaming UI (you can’t tell it’s there). An awesome tool for writing your LLM files.

Apostrophe – the slickest one. A “no distraction” editor.

Cryptpad.fr/code‘s code editor. A nice, no-install, encrypted solution.

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