If you noticed when we added grammar checking, the editor became close to unusable. Every change triggered the grammar checker. The grammar checker blocked input until the entire document was processed.

Blocking input? Updating UI?… oh no… Are we covering threads and the main event loop?

In my ever growing attempts to make the best Markdown Editor Linux users have ever seen, I wanted to find a solution for grammar checking. write-good offered style checking, and Gtk.Spell handled spelling. Style and Spell Check don’t cover grammar though.

I’m calling the current solution, “The Poor Man’s Grammar Checker.”

In my attempts to create a GTK based Markdown Editor, I’ve been working on seeing how I can implement features many electron editors have natively. ThiefMD uses GtkSourceView to render its Markdown, so there’s no DOM to play with.

Hiding Links is a new feature added to ThiefMD.

This feature was accomplished with Gtk.TextTag’s and Regex. Today I want to show you how it’s done.

One of the things I always forget about is accessibility and defaults. After advertising my open source project, I was reminded of these things. People sent screenshots of ThiefMD with unusable header bars and white on white menus and dialogs. The Gtk Theme I use made ThiefMD look super cool on my machine. Users had a different experience.

Not too much time has passed, but with staying inside due to COVID-19 and the Washington Wildfires, I’ve been making a lot of progress on my markdown editor app. This week I added Theme Support, Library Organization, Library Export, and possibly some other stuff.

I initially stole forked a project called Quilter. Quilter’s user experience is great, and I would compare it to iA Writer on macOS. I realized one of the applications I missed the most was Ulysses, and wanted something more like that.

Switching from macOS to Ubuntu has mostly been okay. My main reason for leaving was the laptop keyboard design 😝. As a software developer, a lot of applications I use are already cross-platform. Applications for “creatives” seems lacking in the Linux world. elementary OS is fixing that, but I like feature bloat.

I initially sent pull requests for my code changes into Quilter, but I really wanted to do some changes that would take the app in another direction. Thus, ThiefMD was born…

But here’s a brain dump of thoughts on how we got here…