In the last few weeks I've taken up the habit of writing my posts and replies on use.perl.org as plain text, using markdown markup. I then run the markdown script from the CPAN module redirecting the output to an HTML file, preview in a browser, and finally copy/paste the HTML into the use.perl.org textarea, and submit.
You may know markdown as the markup system utilized by websites such as Reddit and StackOverflow.
The difference in effort in marking up prose text in markdown rather than in any other system use.perl.org allows (such as the allowed subset of plain HTML) would appear to be slight, yet it is quite relevant to me. Even my rather clumsy workflow is still preferable to me, than using the site's standard HTML markup.
It's a really nice thought that markdown originated in Perl, although it has been ported to Javascript, complete with a live preview, which is still primitive compared to the system used on StackOverflow.
And maybe it's an idea to modernize the comment system in use.perl.org a little, as more and more people apparently utter their dislike for the current system.
But likely they think there's still a lot more wrong with it, than just the markup system. :)
The ikiwiki wiki engine use Markdown as it's default language. It's a bit different as wikis go but it's quite good when you get use to it and it's written in Perl.
I have a script that takes a shell command as its arguments, picks up the X11 clipboard contents using xclip, passes it as STDIN to that command, captures the STDOUT, and puts it back in the clipboard. I have a few keyboard shortcuts set up in my window manager that use that script with a Markdown conversion script. So I just copy the Markdown text, hit a key combo, then paste, and it comes out as HTML.
And on use.perl you can just use the site’s own Preview button to check the results.
I use Markdown quite a bit, so it made sense to me to make the effort to integrate it and use it from within emacs, where I spend a lot of my time. And, with the Firefox extension It's All Text, it all fits together nicely.
I had written about the whole thing here.
Re:Integrating Markdown with your editor
bart on 2009-01-28T09:41:31
Thanks for the link to your post. Even though I don't use Emacs, I still found it an interesting read. (as in: what are other programs doing?)
