Skip to content

Future of Mathdown: simplify, upstream #172

Open
@cben

Description

@cben

Since working full-time I don't have enough time to develop Mathdown :-( The time I do have is largely spent on operational things like rotating SSL certs...
People don't really use it (I see 2–6 simultaneous users, and I suspect most just play in the https://mathdown.net/?doc=about sandbox).

What will happen to mathdown.net ?

Mathdown is open-source (but data backend isn't #4) and is not going anywhere. The hosting is cheap and I intend to keep it running for years. But I won't develop it much. In fact I'd like to reduce its scope, e.g. go back to static hosting, to make it easier to keep alive.

Alternatives

Collaborative:

  • https://hackmd.io/. dual-pane. They have many things I don't: a hosted editor, user accounts, 100% open-source backend, ... — and most importantly an active community.
    UPDATE: that's no longer open-source, https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd is the open fork. But no central hosted instance.

  • https://StackEdit.io. dual-pane. Wonderful editor. Collaboration requires some setup.

  • Erik Demain's https://github.com/edemaine/coauthor/ is very promising for active research collaboration.

  • https://cocalc.com/ is great for collaborative research + computation (incl. markdown & latex editors).

  • Also try out Overleaf with Rich Text Mode and/or \usepackage{markdown}.

  • Finally, Dropbox Paper (proprietary) is pretty neat, not markdown but understands pseudo-markdown typing including # for headers, $$ to start math, etc. — with good collab & commenting.

Single-pane with in-place styling — but desktop, not collaborative:

See https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown for tons of markdown tools that support math...

Upstreaming the technology

Instead I'd like to contribute similar abilities to other projects with more users. Mathdown has 2 essential parts:

  1. In-place markdown styling ("WYSIWYM"). I'm happy to see this done by more and more projects.
    My concrete implementation is a thin customization on top of CodeMirror.

    • Upstream some customizations to CodeMirror.
    • Base Mathdown on https://github.com/sparksuite/simplemde-markdown-editor, contribute there as needed.
    • Contribute single-pane mode to HackMD CodiMD (CodeMirror based)
    • Improve Jupyter notebook markdown styling (CodeMirror based) for more seamless editing/rendered transition.
  2. In-place math rendering. Also done by Gitbook editor, Overleaf, and possibly others.

TOCHECK: how do Abricotine / GhostWriter / Uberwriter do in-place styling & math? can it be combined into online collaborative sites?!

Feedback / help welcome

The above is just my plan, I'd love to hear what others want to happen.
Due to the choices I made to keep it anonymous with no analytics, I have very little visibility how people use mathdown.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions