Minimalist Markdown Editor for Chrome

This is the source for the simplest and slickest Markdown editor for Chrome (both the browser and the OS). Download on the Chrome Web Store.
Just write Markdown and see what it looks like as you type. And convert it to HTML in one click.

The Minimalist Markdown Editor project

The Minimalist Markdown Editor project is available both online as a web app, and offline and with file support as a Chrome app:

• Web app (GitHub repository)
• Chrome app (the source code is in this repo)

Contributing

Building

1. Ensure that Node.js is installed, and open a terminal in the project's root directory.
2. Run npm install to install the project's developement dependencies.
3. Run npm run build to build the Chrome app. The builds will be placed in the dist/ directory.

Note: Building should only be necessary if you think about contributing. If you want to run one of the apps, hit one of the links above.

Git workflow

The two project branches share a decent amount of code. This common source code sits in app-shared/ in each of these repos. As you can see from the commit history, changes to files in- and outside of app-shared/ are committed separately to help with cherry-picking the common source changes from the other repo afterward.

E.g. You've made changes to src/css/main.css and src/app-shared/css/main.css. Since changes have been made to files in- and outside of app-shared/, instead of committing all changes at once, make two commits:

1. The first one will be called "[app-shared] commit_message", and will commit changes to src/app-shared/css/main.css.
2. The second one will be called "commit_message", and will commit changes to src/css/main.css.

If changes had only been made to src/css/main.css, then there would've been no need for the first commit. And if changes had only been made to src/app-shared/css/main.css, there would've been no need for the second commit.

That's really all there is to know about this project's Git workflow, so fork away!

A word about ES6+ and target envs

ES6's feature set is frozen, and the standard should be published by June 2015; ES7 is also moving forward. Lots of ES6+ features have been implemented in major JavaScript engines (including V8, Chrome's JS engine), which means they can already be used pretty safely.

Currently, only the Chrome app is authored using ES6+. That means the shared source code between the two apps (in app-shared/) has to be authored in ES5.

The suggested dev environment for the Chrome app is Chrome Canary. That's because V8 implements features at a good pace, and since the target engine is V8 (after all, we're talking about a Chrome app), we might as well work with what we have in V8 and avoid polyfills and their downsides.

Also, since some ES6+ features are hidden behind the "Enable Experimental JavaScript" flag in Chrome and that Canary may support more features than Stable, part of the build process consists in transpiling the ES6+ source to ES5.

Summary:

• Dev env (running src/, authored in ES6+, no polyfills): Chrome Canary with "Enable Experimental JavaScript" flag enabled
• Target env (running dist/, transpiled to ES5, no polyfills): Chrome (browser or OS)
• Target env in app-shared/ (authored in ES5): all major browsers, down to IE9

Edge cases

Are symlinks supported?

Unfortunately, the Chrome API through which MME accesses the filesystem isn't consistent regarding symlinks. What I've observed:

• On Windows:
  • File shortcuts: work as expected
  • File soft links: can't read + can't detect dupes
  • File hard links: can't detect dupes
  • Files inside linked directory: can't detect dupes
• On Linux: haven't tested, feel free to test and send a PR
• On Mac: haven't tested, feel free to test and send a PR
• On ChromeOS: haven't tested, feel free to test and send a PR

Encoding

Like most software nowadays, MME uses UTF-8 to read from and write to files. It currently doesn't support other charsets.

If you happen to want to open in MME a non-UTF-8 file, it probably won't be read properly. To fix that, open it using the original program or another text editor, and paste its contents in MME: it'll display properly and subsequent saves will save the file as UTF-8.

If you must work with non-UTF-8 files on a regular basis though, please get in touch so that we can discuss your particular use-case.

Undo manager

A JS-based undo manager is used in place of the native one. That means you can only use keyboard shortcuts to undo/redo, not native commands such as the ones that appear in context menus.