Formulas! Or: the kind of feedback you love to act on

When I introduced mdlite  here, the post ended with: “If you find a feature missing: maybe that’s intentional.” The reply arrived promptly:

Nice editor! There is actually one feature I’m missing :) Support for formulas, $E = mc^2$. Have a great week! CK

And you know what? CK is right. Formulas aren’t GitHub sync or a carousel of 30 themes — they’re part of writing itself when your texts are technical. Exactly the kind of feature that belongs even in a deliberately lean editor.

So: done. mdlite now renders KaTeX : $E = mc^2$ inline mid-sentence, $$…$$ as a display block. Two new buttons in the toolbar (sporting the radical sign), and if you hit the formula button without a selection, the placeholder you get is — of course — CK’s E = mc^2. The welcome text shows the example rendered live. Price tags like “5 $ apiece and 3 $ more”, by the way, remain plain text; the detection is careful about that.

There was a small bonus exercise, too: the welcome text lives in every visitor’s browser as a perfectly ordinary document — so returning visitors would never have seen the new version with the formula example. mdlite now swaps old, unmodified welcome texts for the current one on load. If you’ve edited yours, you keep your version, naturally.

And since we were at it anyway: big brother mark  can do it now as well. Same syntax, its own toolbar button, formulas in the cheat sheet — version 2.2.0. It already does everything anyway, so this barely registered. 😉

One final tip: right next door, notes.martuni.de  has just launched — sticky notes on a freely scrollable canvas, stored right in your browser, no account, no login. And a “take along” link lets you share your notes for 30 days or carry them to another device. Have a look.

And if you find a feature missing: write to me. Sometimes it isn’t intentional after all.