Ghostwriter Markdown
As I had mentioned in my post about ProtonDrive, I frequently use it for storing Markdown files with notes for my blog posts:
For example, I’ve taken to throwing Markdown files with notes for blog posts into ProtonDrive so that I can easily access them regardless of which of my laptops or iPads I happen to be using when the urge to write strikes. However, I can’t actually interact with Markdown when it’s stored in ProtonDrive. While I can preview the file in my browser, none of the Markdown will render; this isn’t a huge issue, but it would be a nice quality of life improvement for the future.
With none of the Markdown rendering, I needed a quick, simple way to render it in Linux whenever I happened to be writing on one of my 3 Linux laptops. My notes are most commonly authored in Notable, but I don’t typically want an app for an entire note library just to render some Markdown files. Likewise, installing something as heavy as VSCode just for Markdown preview seemed overkill.
Since I had just very recently installed Pop!_OS on one of my laptops that I happened to be using when I needed to render my notes for my post about compiling GeckoEngine for ARM, I figured I would check out the Pop!_Shop software repository they have. A quick search for “Markdown” showed a fairly wide array of options:
After scrolling through the options, I noticed that many of them had massive install sizes of 800+ MB. Those options are all using Flatpack. While Flatpack offers the benefit of sandboxing the application from the rest of the system, the tradeoff is in the install size. Given that I really didn’t want to install something just shy of 1 GB in order to preview tiny Markdown files, I decided to immediately cross anything that was only offered via Flatpack off of my list. I noticed that ghostwriter had 2 options available: one a native Ubuntu package and one for Flatpack.
A quick tour of the application’s website seemed solid, so I opted to install the Ubuntu package. I’m not sure if this applies to Flatpack since I’ve never used it for anything, but installing the Ubuntu version also means that it’ll be updated when I install the rest of Aptitude’s updates from the CLI, which is my main means of updating software on basically every Debian-based Linux system that I use: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
ghostwriter essentially turned out to be exactly what I needed. It’s lightweight (the Ubuntu package was just over 80 MB), fast, and it can give me a nice HTML preview of my Markdown.
The application also offers an impressive array of options. For example, the theme can be independently set for the edit pane and the preview pane, though naturally I applied a dark theme to both. There are only 4 themes provided out of the box — two light and two dark — but you can easily create your own custom themes. I’m thinking I should put together a Dracula theme and share it eventually:
The application by default doesn’t distract users with a rendered preview of the content, but enabling that is as simple as going to the View menu. The same menu offers up plenty of quality of life options as well, such as an outline view and document statistics, the latter of which is visible in the screenshot above.
I don’t see myself spending a lot of time authoring content in ghostwriter simply because I’m typically just consuming notes I’ve already written when I’m on my Linux systems rather than creating new notes. Authoring content and previewing it live seems to be seamless in the bit of testing I’ve done, though, so it’s good to know I won’t need another application in the instance I need to reverse my workflow and create Markdown files in Linux that I’ll be throwing into ProtonDrive to later add to my synced Notable directory.
Originally published at https://looped.network on December 4, 2021.
