Most of them are just CodeMirror / Ace stuffed that takes 90% of the pain of writing anything complicated in that domain, really. The CoreMirror author should take a fee for each product based on his lib, would become a millionaire( same guy who wrote TernJs , Eloquent Javascript , and few others, this guy's insane js developper, not sure how he manages to write this huge libraries in plane javascript and vim ).

I understand your feelings but this isn't a heavily planned startup i've developed, simply a tool I made since I thought it would be cool to make (also an experiment with node-webkit).

I often have exactly the same reaction - the main question being: why? And let me highlight that I am also impressed with the engineering skills required by this (and similar) projects.

The speculative answer that comes to my mind is that engineering is the 'easier' part of coming with a new product. The concept is the 'difficult' part. I put these qualifiers in quotes because there is nothing easy about the engineering, but it comes easier to people that are already working with technology. They know how to make things. Deciding what to make is not an engineering question, but a business (or society) one.

I suspect that this is the reason for quite a few failed startups. They build things that they can, but not necessarily should.

But, again, this is not a criticism of this project, just adjacent discussion.

I have a different problem. All of these new fangled cloud-based html text-editors / IDEs are kinda .. dinky. They're toys. It seems like everyone is tripping over themselves to include as few features as possible and hope they can sell them for $3.99. Where are those editors that are worth a $500 price tag?

My similar product (http://liveditor.com) mainly solves this problem: After tweaking css using Firebug, having to manually copy the changes back to the source code is time-consuming and error-prone.

And LIVEditor's solution is integrating a Firebug-inspired html inspector into a full-featured code editor, of course plus a Chromium-powered real-time preview!

It's nice and simple, I like it. I can't see leaving Notepad++ on Windows or Geany on GNU/Linux for it, but I do like the concept. I think it would be good for someone just learning to use HTML, as they can see immediate results.

Check out https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/

I think a lot of the apps you are using this, or something very similar. I've only played around with it very briefly, but like jw989 said it's pretty straightforward.

Some tutorials here: http://www.scriptol.com/javascript/ Even PHP can use an HTML interface!

Honestly, if you understand how to build frontend applications it is as simple at creating an index.html file and attaching it to the webkit browser.

The reason why I made it with node-webkit and not online is because I prefer my editors to be desktop. However, implementing a preview on the download page would be a good idea too.

While I can't speak for the author, one benefit of packaging your app with node-webkit[1]; is that your app is always used inside this container, that bundles a very recent version of Chromium and has a node.js backend with file system access.

[1]: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

That's what I was going for when I made my GitHub Gist viewer (http://thedata.directory/view/10570653) If you have an HTML gist it'll display it when you put the gist number in the path (as in the link above). It will also give you an embed code so you can collaborate.

Is this what you're looking for? thlorenz.github.io/browserify-markdown-editor/

Isn't the style of the output dictated by the user with Sir Trevor? Would be difficult to come up with something like this that improves the experience over Sir Trevor's inherit MYSIWYG style.

After working with this a little bit, I like this, he did a good job.