Solving my problem, simply

Alright, I’m gonna try hard to make this one short and sweet. I was looking for a Markdown editor (or any plain text editor) that supports LanguageTool. If you’ve seen my first test post, and if you saw it again later, you know that the Sublime integration broke for me. Let’s be real, I wanted the browser way of doing things anyway. In Sublime it’s more oldschool, where you sort of write, and then correct mistakes in batches. You don’t left (neither right!) click the typos like in browser (I think in LibreOffice you do the right click).

I tried, okay. I gave up on my electron hatred, and tried Zettlr, but man, that thing a) didn’t work (?) b) was slow. I don’t get it. Why do you have built-in feature, that doesn’t work? And for slowness. Here’s the deal, it was slower than my browser. Like, it should be just as fast, right? Maybe Firefox is simply superior and I do find Firefox faster than Chrome. I always did. Maybe there was a one-year period when Chrome was actually faster, but at that time I was religious about using Firefox, soooooo. One thing is building a bloated app, the other thing is building a slow bloated app. Next.

I thought stuff in Java can’t be that bad (LanguageTool is written in Java), so Markdown Writer FX was installed. Here’s the deal: a) nobody bothered to package it for Arch (although running it was actually quite simple, so simple) b) It’s not built for Wayland. Sigh. Text must be sharp, period. I’m not gonna go into the entire journey, just giving you a taste here.

So, what do I do? Can I build a text editor myself? From scratch? Drawing widgets low level on Vulkan? Yeah, I’m not quite there yet. But you know what? Do you remember when I said Zetllr was slower than my browser of choice? Originally, I was using Notion, but the web app is quite heavy and therefore clunky. And it got in my way, when I was just trying to type. I thought Browser is fast enough for the task and it has LanguageTool integration through an extension. Hmmmm.

I introduce to you: Simple Markdown Scratchpad! (not a name, not a product, just few lines of JS) Find it here. You can use it in your browser of choice, that means your LanguageTool or Grammarly and that Apple thingy will check your spelling (why can’t MS have system-wide … You know what, pretend I didn’t say anything). Now, you might be worried you will lose your progress if the tab closes unexpectedly. Think again. Thanks to modern JavaScript Web APIs (you know, the native code that actually does the thing you actually want, fast), every keystroke gets locally stored localStorage. Yes, that means it doesn’t sync across devices, but that wasn’t my goal. If you need that, there are many apps that do that. This is a simple and (reasonably) fast editor. Finally, part of my workflow is dropping the .md file into my Hugo repo. So you can export what you wrote. Again, we’re doing plain text here, so there’s that, but if you want to export .txt, go for it, works just fine.

Man, this feels really good. I solved my own problem. I love this. I only wish I was a better programmer, so I could build something more … engineered? Hey, maybe we won’t need another editor. Zed might one day integrate LanguageTool, but now I don’t have to hold my breath. And when they do, I can use a native app for my Markdown needs. Until then, Simple Markdown Scratchpad.

Catch you next time.