ReText, again

Ten or so years ago, if you'd asked me what my preferred markdown editor was, I'd have replied ReText.

And I did use it on an earlier implementation of  the distraction free writing machine which was based on the my old 7" Eee.

And it worked really well, until it didn't. I really liked the simplicity of the interface

and the way you could toggle between edit and preview mode - something that I found valuable when working on a comparatively small laptop screen

(both these screenshots come from my Lenovo IdeaPad 1 running Ubuntu,

 

but trust me, it works just as well with Crunchbang ++ on my distraction free machine - here showing ReText with live preview mode turned on)

As I say, I used to like ReText, but then the authors upgraded it and the new version did not play well on the Eee's eccentrically sized small screen - to be fair they were not the only application with that problem, and I did correspond with the authors about the problem. To be fair, they did try to fix it, but it didn't prove possible to produce a stable version.

I had much the same problem a bit later when I converted a windows MSI netbook to Linux, so I stopped using ReText, and more or less forgot about it.

Up till now, I've been using Ghostwriter as a markdown editor, but I've kind of missed the simplicity of ReText, so I decided to try it again, and it's an excellent note taker, and as I've said elsewhere, you really don't need an in depth knowledge of markdown to create reasonable structured text ...