Markdown is a file format praised by developers. A simple text file, and you get a formatted document, simple yet suited for various uses. I've started using markdown documents for nearly every note I take, gradually moving away from plain text files and good old notepad. What's jarring to me is how few markdown editors there are out there.
A new markdown editor sounds pretty useless, considering there are already free standalone editors available, or you could even use
VSCode with extensions.
However, I don't like that for many reasons, and if you know my stance on UI programming, you already know where this is going.
Pick any "modern desktop app" today, there's a good chance it's not a desktop app. Yep, it's actually a mini web browser that can only
display a single page. Long story short, it's simpler to just claim all the disk space and memory available on a PC and make a shitty
program that works, instead of building actual quality software.
Most of these applications are based on a framework called Electron, which enables writing desktop apps using web languages, which sounds
exactly like what it is : the most idiotic statement ever.
I used Typora for a while as my day-to-day markdown editor and viewer. It supports a wide range of features, such as tables and math formulas. Though, it suffers from multiple issues that impact me directly. First, it's Electron-based. The app weighs 230 MiB on disk, which for such a simple document editor, is way too much. One instance of the app uses about 170 MiB, no document open. It also does not support checkboxes, which is a feature I find useful.
Obviously, the fact that all rendering is GDI-based is not exactly ideal for cross-platform support. This is why this project is being developed in conjunction with another, a research project on a high-level language I like to qualify as "intent-based programming".