Find yourself writing a good bit of Markdown? Wish there was a better editor? Maybe in the new shiny and cool code editor, VS Code?
Dave Johnson has written up a great tutorial on just that!
Build an Amazing Markdown Editor Using Visual Studio Code and Pandoc
Today we’re going to build an amazing Markdown editor using Visual Studio Code and Pandoc. This system will include real-time Markdown linting and the ability to generate html, docx, and pdf documents quickly with the potential to produce many other document formats as well.
Markdown is a simple markup language that allows one to write documents using a text editor and transform those documents into many different formats. Among other things, it works beautifully for documenting source code since the Markdown documents can be checked in and versioned with Git or your source control system of choice.
Pandoc is a highly capable “Swiss army knife” tool for converting documents between various formats. It is not limited to Markdown as an input (source) format, but it is used extensively in this context.
Finally, Visual Studio Code is a solid, lightweight code editor created by Microsoft. It is based on the Electron framework, which facilitates the development of desktop GUI applications using the Node.js framework. I’m a huge fan of VS Code, and have written previous articles about it including the ...
Let’s get started!
Install Visual Studio Code ...
Familiarize yourself with VS Code out-of-the-box Markdown features ...
Try Markdown previewer ...
Markdown Snippets...
Install Markdown linter...
Test drive Markdown linting...
Install Pandoc Extension...
Create configuration files to make a great Markdown editor...
Create settings.json file...
Create Markdown lint configuration file...
Create CSS file to be used by HTML generated by Pandoc...
Create an HTML Document with Pandoc...
Conclusion
You have now created an awesome Markdown editor/environment that you can use for all of your documentation needs! Pandoc provides a number of other conversion options that you can either add in the VS Code configuration or run from the command line to produce other document formats, create books, etc. You now have an amazing Markdown editor. Go have fun with it!
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