Future of Mathdown: simplify, upstream

[cben]

Since working full-time I don't have enough time to develop Mathdown :-( The time I do have is largely spent on operational things like rotating SSL certs... People don't really use it (I see 2–6 simultaneous users, and I suspect most just play in the https://mathdown.net/?doc=about sandbox).

What will happen to mathdown.net ?

Mathdown is open-source (but data backend isn't #4) and is not going anywhere. The hosting is cheap and I intend to keep it running for years. But I won't develop it much. In fact I'd like to reduce its scope, e.g. go back to static hosting, to make it easier to keep alive.

Alternatives

Collaborative:

• https://hackmd.io/. dual-pane. They have many things I don't: a hosted editor, user accounts, 100% open-source backend, ... — and most importantly an active community. UPDATE: that's no longer open-source, https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd is the open fork. But no central hosted instance.

• https://StackEdit.io. dual-pane. Wonderful editor. Collaboration requires some setup.

• Erik Demain's https://github.com/edemaine/coauthor/ is very promising for active research collaboration.

• https://cocalc.com/ is great for collaborative research + computation (incl. markdown & latex editors).

• Also try out Overleaf with Rich Text Mode and/or \usepackage{markdown}.

• Finally, Dropbox Paper (proprietary) is pretty neat, not markdown but understands pseudo-markdown typing including # for headers, $$ to start math, etc. — with good collab & commenting.

Single-pane with in-place styling — but desktop, not collaborative:

• http://abricotine.brrd.fr/
• https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/
• https://uberwriter.github.io/uberwriter/

See https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown for tons of markdown tools that support math...

Upstreaming the technology

Instead I'd like to contribute similar abilities to other projects with more users. Mathdown has 2 essential parts:

1. In-place markdown styling ("WYSIWYM"). I'm happy to see this done by more and more projects. My concrete implementation is a thin customization on top of CodeMirror.

   • [ ] Upstream some customizations to CodeMirror.
   • [ ] Base Mathdown on https://github.com/sparksuite/simplemde-markdown-editor, contribute there as needed.
   • [ ] Contribute single-pane mode to ~~HackMD~~ CodiMD (CodeMirror based)
   • [ ] Improve Jupyter notebook markdown styling (CodeMirror based) for more seamless editing/rendered transition.

2. In-place math rendering. Also done by Gitbook editor, Overleaf, and possibly others.

   • [ ] Improve Codemirror multiplex mode to work better for math-in-markdown, math-in-latex.
   • [ ] Improve markdown/math parsing in https://github.com/edemaine/coauthor/
   • [ ] https://github.com/SamyPesse/codemirror-widgets is possibly better than my CodeMirror-MathJax.
   • [ ] Contribute to Jupyter notebook?
   • [ ] Contribute to Sage/CoCalc notebook?

TOCHECK: how do Abricotine / GhostWriter / Uberwriter do in-place styling & math? can it be combined into online collaborative sites?!

Feedback / help welcome

The above is just my plan, I'd love to hear what others want to happen. Due to the choices I made to keep it anonymous with no analytics, I have very little visibility how people use mathdown.