James LaRue - myliblog

A few months ago, I installed the   elementary   OS (a Linux based distribution) on an old 2011 Mac. On the one hand, I had to fiddle with things some, as one does with Linux. But on the whole, the experience has been very positive. Computing can be fun.   The desktop environment (think Gnome or KDE or Mac or Windows) of elementary is called Pantheon. It has a very nice look to it, light and fast. It’s not Mac, but it’s Mac-like, meaning that it seeks mostly to get out of your way. Unlike many distros, elementary has its own AppCenter, where applications written for the environment are offered for sale, for modest sums. Or sometimes for free. Recently, I bought three of them that together make up a nice tool set, handy for the creation and elaboration of documents. That’s my primary interest in them. The first was   Minder , a mindmap program written by Trevor Williams. It was responsive and colorful. Pantheon, and elementary generally, leans toward the m...

I encountered the first version of SmartDown , written in C+, version 1.0) in November of 2014. It was a minimal, "Zen" writing application. That is, the screen was very stripped down: the top had a sandwich menu, window controls and nothing else; the middle was a pleasant faint grey background and a darker text; and there was a line at the bottom of the screen with a character and line count, and a toggle between editing and preview. Hover your mouse over the character count, and get a word and sentence count. Markdown editors are all pretty much the same: simple text with a handful of markdown symbols to control formatting. What distinguished SmartDown was that it also offered "folding" - the ability to "collapse" or conceal text under a "#" heading. In short, it was a clean, fast, quickly learned writing application that allowed for the creation and manipulation of complex documents. At the end, the text could be exported or copied as html...

I found another wonderful tool for writing, definitely worth sharing. It's called Haroopad . It's an open source, cross-platform, markdown-based, code folding-capable editor. You can download Mac, Windows, and Linux versions from here . The defaults seem to be set up for writers. You can toggle views: editor and HTML viewer side by side, or viewer (on the left) and editor (on the right) if you prefer that orientation, or just one or the other. It has a constant word count display on the bottom status bar. It has lots of themes. There's an automatic focus on the current paragraph. The best thing is code folding. (This is a neat trick that turns a text editor into an outliner . By that, I mean that you can selectively hide and reveal big blocks of text, allowing one to see or rearrange the structure of a document.) I did have to toggle it on (on the Mac, it was under File>Preferences). It works reliably and consistently by structure (header level). I love outliners. ...