PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything PanWriter isn't all that small, but it's simple, clean, and does the bare minimum over a plain text editor. If you are a programmer there is an almost embarrassing abundance of text editors, from crusty old things from the 1970s that require you to actively cultivate Stockholm Syndrome, to sophisticated modern efforts that try …
Never in 27 years of writing have I written one story recommending a tool, in which so many people have commented or replied telling me to try other tools which either don't do the same thing, or do it and 100x more, or don't meet some of the critical requirements, or are just plain not as good.
It is almost impressive.
Anyway, I thought I'd let you know that I did actually try ReText.
Good points:
* very easy to install -- `pip install retext` and it's there
* nice GUI
* shows bold, italic and links in the markdown source: that's a win
* integrates with the Unity global menu bar
* relatively small, quick enough even on decade+ old kit
* has a preview and optional _live_ preview (took me a little work to find that)
* has a word count, although a little clumsily overlain over the document
Snags:
* considerable more complex UI, although I've found how to hide the toolbar
(notable when I praised Panwriter for its simplicity and clean UI)
* can't put rich text in the clipboard for other apps, a core function for me
* can't export to (say) Word or LibreOffice document formats
So, thank you. I think this is the best suggestion of them all so far. I can see that this might be a useful tool in the future, possibly, and it's a nice nifty little app.
But for me, right now, it doesn't do the core things I need and praised in the article -- the very clean UI and the very flexible rich output formats.
"Sometimes you just want something dead simple: words, maybe bold and italics, and hyperlinks because it's the 22nd century, and that's about it."
If we are in the mood of semi-randomly pitching FOSS software, than I ll throw one in the mix.
That is also where ViM comes in, at just a bit more than 1/10 the size. If you really like Pandoc, it has support for that as well. And yes, it is cross-platform.
Did you not notice this bit where I wrote:
> crusty old things from the 1970s that require you to actively cultivate Stockholm Syndrome
That is specifically aimed at Vi, Vim, Emacs etc. I utterly detest them.
They are programmers' text editors, not tools for writers, and thus specifically and explicitly the kind of tool I *don't* want, because they do about 10,000 things I don't want and don't need, and they can't do things that I do want and sometimes do need.
Vim cannot render Markdown. It cannot show me when I've accidentally used bold instead of italics. It cannot show me if I have formatted a link correctly.
This is the entire point of the story.
Why does it need to render Markdown? The whole point of Markdown is that you can see the codes on the screen, like Protext or WordPerfect for DOS did.
If there was a modern version of Protext that ran on Windows and macOS, I'd snap up a copy in a heartbeat.
I had it on my CPC6128, the Amiga and for MS-DOS.
I explained why I wanted that *right in the article!*
> Markdown is readable as plain text with a tiny bit of formatting, but even with practice, it's easy to forget
> which is bold and which is underline, or which parentheses to use. PanWriter has a handy WYSIWYG live
> preview that shows you at a glance if you've got it right.
What more can I do to spell it out?
The point of the article is that this is a very useful improvement over what a plain text editor can do.
I wrote the article to say "here is a tool that is useful for things a text editor cannot do" and then I get comments saying "well why not use a plain text editor?"
I think this is in the running for my single least-understood article for the Reg ever. :-(
Even on Twitter, that renowned haven of deep analysis and reasoned critical debate, there are people saying "my word the commenters really don't get it, do they?"
Welcome to the corner well tested by prose from here, Liam Proven. :-)
There’s really no need to wonder, for there can surely be only one viable conclusion when IT can reveal the same thing to you as it does to me about the current dire and dismal state of States Internet Networking of Things for Everything?
IT's a veritable California Gold Rush type opportunity but one where the strangely excessive and vaguely wealthy struggle to survive intact and practically privately protected and virtually unknown with just their lives and a few of their many ill-gotten gains/prize possessions given the new raw powers and dark matter energies that are now ranged and rearranging all manner of ancient and postmodern things before them.
A Most Welcome of Brave New More Orderly World Orders for some who may or may not be a Just Chosen Few, a FCUKIng Desperate and Disorderly Nightmare for Others more than simply worthy of Suffering Such as their Just Fate/Manifest Destiny.
If folk take leave of their senses, is failure to comprehend plain text English, a universal symptom/prime indicator?
I wrote the article to say "here is a tool that is useful for things a text editor cannot do" and then I get comments saying "well why not use a plain text editor?"
I always quite liked MS WordPad. Nice, light and simple. I'm no longer a Windows user but I suspect if it still exists it's probably bloated out of all recognition by now.
"I think this is in the running for my single least-understood article for the Reg ever. :-("
Naa! You've been here long enough to know by now that some people skim-read then comment on their misunderstandings on a frequent basis here. Some have clearly only read the headline, maybe got as far as the sub-head before leaping into the comments section :-)
@John Brown (no body) Just check on my home PC Win 11 and WordPad is still shipped with Win 11. Still the same lightweight program though it does have the ribbon.
Also still saves simple RTF. Save a 2 line doc as RTF in WordPad 1kb opened the RTF in Word and saved as RTF again 42kb.
I've managed to keep a copy of the EXEs for Wordpad, Notepad, and Paint from Server 2003. All three (including the .WPC files for Wordpad) are a whopping 1.13 MB total, and all will run under WIn10. I use Notepad and Paint the most, and only rarely use Wordpad anymore ( and usually wind up running the Win10 ribbonified version when I do need it).
It's a situation where you have requirements (I was going to say special needs, but that's a charged phrase these days!) that others don't understand, yet some want to be helpful, while others are just deaf, dumb & dumber who comment.
There was a time years ago where I needed exactly what you're asking for. I understand 100%. I no longer have the need, but will give it a spin for old times sake and to see something new to me.
Thank you for your notification about this app.
A but the last 70 years of computer development is just bloatware, or something.
Why take advantage of all this new technology we now have available to us, when you could use some cryptic command line thing, wire up core memory by hand, or dip the end of a feather into an ink bottle and write it on parchment.
I understood what you want from the article. It's not what I want, so after reading the piece I'm not rushing out to download PanWriter; but I also know my use cases and preferences aren't universal. And I don't mind taking a few minutes to hear about what someone else wants.
That said, if I were looking for something like this, I don't know that I'd be able to stomach an Electron app. Having to suffer with Teams is bad enough. But, again, preferences.
> Even on Twitter, that renowned haven of deep analysis and reasoned critical debate, there are people saying "my word the commenters really don't get it, do they?"
Could this perhaps be picking up on a simple text editor with hyperlinks and markdown output but no programming features being more of a Reg *writer* than Reg *reader* thing?
BTW -- re Protext -- I have it running inside VirtualBox on top of FreeDOS here. It seems to work rather well.
You can get Protext for DOS here:
https://clasqm.github.io/freedos-repo/Productivity.html
I wrote about FreeDOS 1.3 recently:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/23/freedos_13/
And about how to run DOS under Linux, Windows and Mac here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_running_dos/
I have Word 5.5 and Word 6 running under DOSemu2 on this machine, and they work very nicely indeed. I have not tried Protext under DOSemu2, but I am sure it would work fine.
DOSemu2 is Linux-only of course. n Windows or on Mac, I would suggest VDOS Plus, or DOSBOX-X.
The advice on this page for setting up WordPerfect for DOS on modern macOS will also apply to Protext:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/
Abiword works fairly well for me on my more ancient Thinkpad. Opens and saves a range of file types but not markdown so does not meet criteria implied in the OA. Abiword can export LaTeX markup and so cross conversion to markdown possible using pandoc including proper quotation marks. Might even be lighter than an electron app. The CherryTree note taking program can edit rich text in a fashion and export to html and pdf.
Windows has Wordpad and Mac OS has TextEdit. Linux graphical layers/toolkits appear not to provide a rich text editor object so I suppose it is harder to provide a basic rich text native program under Linux. Yes, I do know that GNU Step might provide an early version of TextEdit. Not tried that yet.
PS: On Linux at home since 2006 or so. The only MacOS applications I miss are TextEdit and the amazing Preview (i.e. pdf as a display description language being used underneath).
Sadly, Abiword seems to be be an almost abandoned project. The source is at https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/AbiWord but the last change was 9 months ago. I think LibreOffice ate its lunch. I used Abiword on Windows ar one time, but there were some deficiencies that caused me to drop it (mainly poor Finnish support and no document encryption option). But it is the only relatively modern FOSS word processor that is not too bloated and starts quickly.
Another, although not as featureful was Ted. There are many editing programs with that name, but this one was a word processor that used RTF as the native format and was based on the Motif toolkit. Think FOSS reimplementation of old-school Wordpad. Homepage https://nllgg.nl/Ted/ (but this is even more abandoned less than Abiword).
Have to issue a correction about Ted: It uses the more modern gtk2 GUI toolkit, not Motif. Just for fun tried to build it from source on a Fedora Linux system, and it went smoothly following the build instructions, and without having to modify anything, which is NOT typical of large Linux programs last updated in 2013. The build did print out lots of deprecation warnings about some gtk2 API features, but these did not prevent compilation.
Here at least is a word processor that starts instantly.
Actually, there's no reason why gvim shouldn't be able to render Markdown into a separate buffer, and you could use splitting to show that simultaneously and have it update in real time. Someone could just write a plug-in for that, if there's actually demand.
But among vim users (of which I am one) there may not be much demand for such a thing. Or someone may already have done it.
I prefer emacs and Latex for my documentation needs. It's crufty in some ways, but within emacs I've got my fingers trained for the basics of editing. Beginning of line, end of line, delete character, mark a block of text and cut/copy/move.
I've done this for decades. Even micro-emacs with the *very* limited subset of emacs movement commands is perfectly useable to edit latex (or markdown) documents.
There's also the WYSIWYG Latex editor 'Lyx' to do what you want here. And TeX/LaTeX is just as powerful as Markdown, it's just a different syntax, with alot more power under the hood.
But you know, that's the joy of open source and choices, people can use what they want, and offer suggestions on different ways to achieve the same end.
Now I do admit the use of pandoc to export to RTF so you can cut'n'paste it into other places in a formatted state is a *neat* thing. There are places where a GUI is a good tool. But not always. And not when you have to do something over and over and over again. Why else do people use 'Ctrl-S' to save, why have a key combination when there's a perfectly good mouse and menu bar where you can save all you want? Because it's not efficient. And as an author, I'm sure you are *very* efficient when it comes to pounding out words because you get paid by the word, and anything which slows you down isn't good. So the investing of time to learn a key set of shortcuts is well worth it.
And I agree 100%! I use emacs because that's what my fingers know for editing, but I don't use more than 2% of the power of emacs I'm sure. There's so much it does and can do and which people have added to it, but unless you try to learn it all and use it all, it just drifts away.
Yeah, I use LaTeX for my personal (and, back in the day, academic) writing too. Generally I use LyX, though it's easy enough to load a LyX file – just LaTeX with some additional markup – into vim, say, if I want to do something that's not entirely convenient in LyX. And I used to do outlining with FreeMind and then use an XSLT stylesheet to convert the FreeMind XML format into LaTeX.
But what Liam's describing sounds like a use case where LaTeX is overkill. LaTeX produces nicely1 typeset documents, these days mostly in PDF now that the troff family has faded from prominence. Using LaTeX for a short document with minimal styling (italics, bold, and hyperlinks) where layout and typesetting really aren't much of a concern, and you may need a wide range out output formats – that's overcomplicated and not a great fit.
Indeed, if your output is real POSH HTML, you aren't going to be doing much layout, and no typesetting, because the UA will handle the final formatting. And that's as it should be, for HTML. So the greatest advantage of TeX is irrelevant in that case.
1Well, yes, there's some debate about the layouts produced by TeX and LaTeX. But better than Word does, certainly.
It's Ok - you don't need to panic. Emacs can do all that for you (org-mode).
It's also got an integrated text adventure and tetris for when the muse abandons you, and a psychotherapist when you feel your mind rebelling against the key combinations.
I think there's a little OS embedded in there as well for free.
Come... join us in the recent past. It's comforting, and is a great hand work out.
Did you not notice this bit where I wrote:
> crusty old things from the 1970s that require you to actively cultivate Stockholm Syndrome
That is specifically aimed at Vi, Vim, Emacs etc. I utterly detest them.
Yes, I did. I rarely use vim for actual programming, while I more often use it as a note taking tool.
Which is also partly why I mentioned ViM, as despite being "vintage" it has many more modern variations that address the use case mentioned e.g.
https://medium.com/@kadek/a-killer-gui-for-neovim-vimr-ce68e4fa1a3b
-Multiple windows
-Markdown preview
-Generic HTML preview
The post was not meant to be inflammatory/derogatory in any way shape or form, as could be inferred by my other post in the same article. In the same vein, this post is not meant to further continue the discussion, but just to clarify. We share similar goals but start from different premises.
We can still agree to disagree, share a coffee and seamlessly collaborate on markdown documents edited with our favorite tools (something which cannot be said of more popular file formats).
You do if you don't want to keep taking your hands off the home row. Either you use the mouse (or whatever pointing device you have), or you memorize "accelerators", which are just "cryptic key combinations" dumbed down for people who don't want to learn things.
I wouldn't recommend vim to people who aren't already using it, to be honest. It's got a tremendous amount of historical baggage and tremendous complexity. (Same for emacs, particularly since I don't even like emacs.) But this refrain of "ooh modern UIs are so easy and fast!" that we've heard since Steve Jobs began parading the Mac around is nonsense. It's a bogus generalization and it's not supported by research.
Indeed. Use VS Code to write markdown, it includes preview support... and extensions can extend that. Which, while a similar download, has a lot of other abilities.
On which topic, from the article
It uses Markdown, which is a sort of lowest-common-denominator markup language.
Assuming a decent Markdown variant (ie. Common Mark compatible) and a couple of extensions (TeX support, and diagrams, via Mermain.js) you've got a tool that can produce better results than most work processors.
You're right. And of course text editors are one of the most vexed areas of all.
That is why I inserted a dig at Vi* and Emacs, which, predictably, their fans did not realise _was_ a dig.
No, there is no outliner. Sadly.
I do not know of any decent FOSS outliner, and that is the only reason I keep WinWord around.
Before I found Panwriter, I used Atom and a Markdown preview plugin, but it's even bigger and a lot clunkier.
There was an outliner plugin for Atom with quite a good, clean UI, but it only output to some odd XML format for handling family trees. It was free but contained a rider stipulating that it wasn't FOSS and when it reached 1.0 stage it would become paid.
https://atom.io/packages/foldingtext-for-atom
AFAICS it never got to v1.0.
Oddly enough, the LogSeq knowledge-management tool has a passable outline editor, but it's not meant to be a writing tool and it's not simple or lightweight.
https://logseq.com/
My spin on that is that the existence of the likes of PanWriter in the form it's in is a failure in software development as a whole. (And therefore not any reflection on or misunderstanding of what you wrote!)
Why isn't it now a straightforward matter to take a full-fat code editor and rebuild it with a few clicks to do only a single one of the million and one tasks it does, and with that, all the now-unnecessary chrome?
I find it baffling how we still struggle with the basics of software development.
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