[rspeer]

I love this approach.

I've seen too many double-pane markdown editors, which strike me as an uninspired, bloated interface.

Markdown is already readable! You don't need to waste half your interface on a preview that's visible all the time, when you can just syntax-highlight the Markdown to be its own preview.

[brute]

The best interface I have seen yet allows you to switch between source and rendered text on a paragraph-to-paragraph basis[1]. There is really no reason why the text you are currently NOT editing should not be rendered. Unfortunatly this approach is a little bit more challenging to implement, why so few editors use it.

That said, I fully agree with your stance on double-pane editors.

[1] http://www.inkcode.net/qute

[bjeanes]

I have long held the same opinion as the parent comment and even attempted to build it myself a few times, but I hadn't seen qute, and I think I like that approach even better. Well, a hybrid; the paragraph currently being edited could be highlighted as markdownify does.

[mynegation]

Markdown by itself _is_ pretty readable. Ultimately, you want to have it rendered though. This is why live preview helps me a lot. Markdown, while readable by itself, has many gotchas that may screw up the rendered result: newline here, wrong indentation there, forgot to put pipe symbol in the table etc etc. It is much easier and faster to catch these things right away than after the fact. I compare this to the on-the-fly syntax check in IDEs that saved me countless compile-and-fix cycles and boosted my productivity tremendously.

[ergothus]

...which is why the above poster recommended syntax-highlighting. Not raw MD, but not double the output space either.

[dredmorbius]

Two-pane is useful as it highlights precisely where you're fouling up Markdown in realtime. On far too many platforms (including HN) I have to go through multiple submit-edit cycles to try to fix buggy markup.

G+ is horrible at this as it parses double and single spaces differently (a double space is "<space><nbspace>").

On HN, it's the failure to recognize underbars. Since I write _italic_ and bold, I keep leaving underbars all over my comments. I'll notice and fix some of them (just nearly did it there with "some"), but often don't run across the issue until after the re-edit window has closed.

Reddit's RES double-pane editor is among the best I've encountered especially in full-screen view, screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/ySsncbq.png

[robbiep]

It depends. I'm building interfaces that have non technical users and being able to have preview is important.

Having said that I can't find anything that is easily integratable with flask so I think I will go with this for now

[sonthonax]

I disagree. I use markdown as my typesetting software, and I try to create good looking documents, so seeing how it's being rendered is quite important at times.