Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe (opens in new tab)

It uses a theory called Operational Transformation [1] which is roughly the base for most collaborative tools like google docs.

My first attempt was using a library called ot.js [2], I changed it to support an async db since it only supported a in-memory store and I adapted to use mongodb. The experiment is in [3] and it has some bugs still.

Then I found out the guys at firebase adapted ot.js client side to work with their own db, and created something called Firepad [4]. So, I used that instead which was more stable and I added auth and authn.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

[2]: https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/

[3]: http://github.com/auth0/mdocs and http://mdocs.io

[4]: http://www.firepad.io/

Hello there!

I'm using it today for a sales document, it's sweet.

Well, there are some more complex yUML diagrams on the yUML samples page that don't work. It's probably yUML's fault because the syntax isn't quite "proper". But it would be nice if fiddle.md had a way of embedding yUML DSL. E.g.

==== yUML Class Diagram ==== [Company]<>->[User] [Company]<>->[Record] [User]-.-[note: A regular user] ==== end ====

> It should be possible to scroll in the preview section, and then keep typing...

Yes of course, that works, but you have to scroll manually.

Maybe I don't write the way other people do, and that's why I need automatic sync and most people don't: I don't write linearly, I write "all over the place".

I constantly go up and down a document when I'm writing something: what's getting written at the bottom impacts what was written at the top. Also I think of better ways of saying something once I've written it, and once I do I need to make changes.

If, every time I change sections, I need to scroll the preview, it's incredibly distracting/annoying (or, useless: but then it's better to have no preview at all).

Also, once a document is of any serious length (say, over 3 pages), finding the part where you are in the preview can get a little difficult.

Many thanks for this, stackedit looks great. Although I don't understand why there are preview features in the edit pane as well as the preview pane.

The beauty of Markdown is that it's simple text; this is distracting and a little unpleasant.

For me the only feature that's missing in Google Drive is not being able to use Markdown.

I've wondered about the same question, and I also personally greatly prefer markdown. I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown. Thus RST was more mature than Markdown at the time when Python documentation was a disaster zone and people were looking around for technology on which to build Sphinx. So I think RST versus Markdown for Python is more or less a "historical accident"; by now, there's a massive amount of documentation in RST, and it's too hard to switch everybody over. This situation reminds me somewhat of how Python uses Mercurial instead Git (see [1]); many years ago it was unclear whether Mercurial or Git would "win", and in fact many people (at least myself included, with SageMath!) thought incorrectly that Mercurial would win. Hindsight is 20/20, and fixing making the wrong bet on which technology will win can be extremely painful (at least it was very hard for us to switch SageMath from Mercurial to Git).

[1] https://docs.python.org/devguide/faq.html#where-can-i-learn-...

Actually, I completely disagree. Rst can do things that markdown will never be able to do (at least, not any of the common dialects). E.g., you can create your own directives to do special formatting however you'd like. You also have a ton more functionality built-in (e.g., a directive for LaTeX-style math) that is also incredibly uncommon in markdown.

Furthermore, the document structure in rst is far more powerful (e.g., you choose your heading conventions).

As it turns out, I am not actually a huge fan of python (and there are plenty of problems with rst), but in the comparison between mdown and rst, the only argument I actually see in favor of mdown is that it's more commonly used (though the fact that commonmark has yet to completely take over actually mitigates that a fair bit).

> Markdown lacks a proper standard

http://commonmark.org/. Of course, you might already know about this, and just be playing the https://xkcd.com/927/ card.

On that topic, does anyone know what flavour of markdown is being used here (in fiddle.md)?

And here I thought I was alone on this. Glad to see that I'm not the only one who things RST is terrible.

Just as a quick note for you. Be aware that certain directives in rst can be security risks if you allow them to be run arbitrarily by users. If you haven't already done so, you should probably look into that.

This seems like an interesting service, I will need to take a look at it, thanks!

Don't forget that it also looks good :D

Great! Looks very good! :)

Although, table-support seems to be very limited. The table is generated correctly, but it doesn't look nice enough. Take a look at LightPaper for inspiration.