Reproduce Bear in Atom

#1

Bear is a nice piece of software. A markdown editor dedicated to taking notes. For this purpose, it doesn’t focus on the “rendering”; instead, it attempts to make the markdown syntax as appealing as possible, through some clever theming. But it does allow inter-file linking (a lá Wiki style) and hashtags categorisation:

Now, Atom is my editor of choice, and I have it the way I want. So, my first attempt was to reproduce Bear in Atom. There are a lot of markdown packages out there, but most of them provide a second “rendering” pane instead of doing things “inline”. I believe that for most of the things (different display of Headers, Lists, etc, etc…), one can resort to some CSS hacks. Figures, on the other hand, are a different beast. Same goes for file linking and hashtags, which might require specific plugin logic.

So here’s my question: is there any set of packages out there one can use to reproduce Bear on Atom, or, alternatively (and before I start writing my own), do you guys believe everything Bear gives can be done with an Atom package?

#2

I don’t know of any package that does the same thing as Bear. For the figures, you could look at how Hydrogen inserts graphs. There’s a chance that you would have to make your own language package in order to give each item a distinctive class so that you can hack its CSS. Here’s something to try: in a document with a few different headers and formatting items, go to the dev tools (View -> Developer -> Toggle Dev Tools), hit Ctrl-F and search for a word in the buffer (make it something weird like “pontification”) to get to where the code is displayed. From there, you can see how it’s structured and what CSS you have to work with from the start.