I find this very interesting, among the many Markdown editors available. I’m a tech journalist, and I’ve been using iA Writer as my main text editor for hundreds of articles over the years.
Font choices are obviously needed.
I hesitate to use text editors that hide Markdown code, but I’m tempted to switch. It would be good if there was a command to show all Markdown code. What you have only shows things like bold and italic, but not links. I’d want a keyboard shortcut to show all the code including links when I’m revising articles instead of having to click each one to check it.
If I open a file, then option to display the left sidebar isn’t available.
I would also like to add arbitrary folders to the sidebar other than by drag and drop. My first thought was that the + icon would add a folder, not create a new file. That, too me, is what Command+N is for.
It would be nice to change the background color; I’m used to using a light gray from iA Writer, and it is certainly easier on the eyes than white.
Aside from all that, this is a very nice looking app, and I’m already tempted to use it as may daily text editor.
I should clarify I was looking for the menu bar command to open the currently open file in Finder. I find that useful to bind to a keyboard shortcut so that I don’t have to mouse around in the sidebar while working.
Can you speak more to this? What are the pain points? I always found Bear’s folding pretty intuitive.
It’s less about the interaction and more about how it’s stored
In Bear we took the Markdown philosophy all the way: everything lives inside the document; tags, for instance. Folding works the same way: marking a section as folded effectively writes a special comment into the Markdown itself. That’s great in Bear, where the file is ours and lives in our database.
Lettera is different. It opens files that live anywhere on your disk; across projects, and often shared with others or with other tools. Writing Lettera-specific markers into those files, just to remember what’s folded, isn’t something we’re comfortable doing: it would mean putting text only Lettera understands into a file you might hand to someone else (or open in another editor).
We’re taking in a lot of feedback right now, and folding is definitely something we want to discuss soon.
Yes, I agree with your view. For example I’ve always found Logseq’s way of polluting the .md file with property::value for basic interactions like folding annoying. And I have noticed copying text out of Bear while folding is active does a similar thing. I’m not too familiar with how that can be handled by the editor (Obsidian seems to do it), but if there’s no other way than to store it inside the file, I’ve found iA Writer’s approach to Authorship less intrusive than standard in-line comments. AFAICT it’s some form of standoff markup at the very end of the document.
But you don’t have to do it that way. You could save Lettera-specific metadata in an external file in the app bundle. Or use the $XDG_STATE_HOME (a.k.a. ~/.local/state) directory.
One example: folding was added to Vim 6.0 in 2001; it must be storing the folding state in an external file.
