Fiddle.md

Productivity

collaborative markdown editor

SHOW HN2015

129points
69comments
#172of 2,565 in 2015
Top 7%of 2015 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

12 positive, 22 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 10 critical, out of 47 comments about the project. Thread score +0.09.

Idea: 7 for, 2 againstDesign: 4 for, 5 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Simple, clean design and no signup needed

    From 3 comments
    • Very nice! I love how easy you have made it to start a new fiddle, eliminating the signup. I'm all in for less signup walls on the internet!
      mrborgen on HN
    • I'm a fan of this - elegant and simple way to make markdown more accessible to those who would otherwise shy away from it's learning curve
      nb410 on HN
    • Really like the design, especially the search/menu box. It would be very nice to add proper support for tabs, especially when inserting larger blocks of code.
      ComNik on HN
  • Markdown syntax helper is useful

    From 1 comment
    • I love the syntax helper in the bottom. I've added markdown to a few projects and usually, I just added a help text summary near the input to remind users of the syntax; this is…
      NKCSS on HN

Objections

  • Collaboration is unclear; changes not synced live

    From 2 comments
    • I'm confused how this is collaborative. If a friend sends me a fiddle.md link and I change the content of the document, how do they become aware of my changes? Do I send them my…
      yellowbkpk on HN
    • We tried to approach collaboration in a very simple way that doesn't require accounts and heavy realtime Google Docs-style co-editing. Our collaboration relies on versions and…
      ggordan on HN
  • Preview does not sync with editing position

    From 2 comments
    • As soon as the content is over a page long, the "preview" doesn't really work, since what is supposed to be previewed is out of bounds. I had developed a few years ago a markdown…
      bambax on HN
    • > It should be possible to scroll in the preview section, and then keep typing... Yes of course, that works, but you have to scroll manually. Maybe I don't write the way other…
      bambax on HN
  • Tab key moves focus instead of inserting tabs

    From 2 comments
    • Would be nice if the tab key inserted a tab instead of jumping to the next field (for writing code, etc).
      wrl on HN
    • Really like the design, especially the search/menu box. It would be very nice to add proper support for tabs, especially when inserting larger blocks of code.
      ComNik on HN
  • Tables render poorly without styling

    From 2 comments
    • Great! Looks very good! :) Although, table-support seems to be very limited. The table is generated correctly, but it doesn't look nice enough. Take a look at LightPaper for…
      Gurrewe on HN
    • I think it just needs some CSS love. Switch to HTML and you can definitely see it's putting out a table—it's just not a very pretty table.
      freshyill on HN

Requests

  • Accounts to save and organise documents

    From 2 comments
    • What about user accounts where we can keep track of Fiddles, so we can organize them with tags and categories?
      brento on HN
    • The only thing that prevents me from using this that I can't make an account to save my documents, and I can't get that url bar to go away. The giant bar that says…
      jaywunder on HN
  • Dark theme

    From 1 comment
  • Dropbox import and other storage integrations

    From 2 comments
    • As an academic that writes in Markdown (usually solo, offline), this ticks so many boxes for me. I love that for once I may be able to convince my co-authors to collaborate in…
      quinndupont on HN
    • I've played a bit and it looks really interesting. I see you currently support saving the fiddles to dropbox. Do you plan to add other storage systems? I'm thinking it would be…
      xomateix on HN
  • Custom CSS and open source release

    From 1 comment
    • I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are: - Allow custom CSS - Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL Do you plan to open…
      xfalcox on HN
  • Embedded yUML diagram support

    From 1 comment
    • Hello there! I'm using it today for a sales document, it's sweet. Well, there are some more complex yUML diagrams on the yUML samples page that don't work. It's probably yUML's…
      tobinharris on HN

Questions

  • Is it open source?

    From 1 comment
    • I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are: - Allow custom CSS - Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL Do you plan to open…
      xfalcox on HN
  • Which Markdown flavour is used?

    From 1 comment
    • > Markdown lacks a proper standard http://commonmark.org/. Of course, you might already know about this, and just be playing the https://xkcd.com/927/ card. On that topic, does…
      jumpwah on HN

Alternatives named

  • mdocs

    From 1 comment
    • Shameless plug: I worked on a similar tool mdocs [1]. The main difference is that is opensource, it supports authentication and authorization [2] similar to Google Docs. The…
      jfroma on HN
  • Socrates

    From 1 comment
    • Looks just like a bit more polished version of Socrates[1] [1] http://socrates.io/
      andrewguenther on HN
  • StackEdit

    From 1 comment
    • stackedit.io handles this part of it pretty well. Looking at this, I was wondering why this team didn't just fork that for their intended collaboration use-case (which is neat!).
      ci5er on HN
  • Google Docs

    From 1 comment
    • For me the only feature that's missing in Google Drive is not being able to use Markdown.
      brento on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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