My favorite joke, or truth, is “We’ll test in Production.” Which is great when things work. I added a lot more features to ThiefMD. My test approach was “Hands on Functional Testing.” Which worked well until I tried to do a release blog post, and the images weren’t there.

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…

It might sound dumb, but open source terrifies me. I love reading about people suffering from impostor syndrome. I’m also pretty sure that’s why I write a blog post about once every 2 years.

With open source, I have no clue how the licenses work… I created a fork of an open source markdown editor, and took parts of other open source code to make it work how I want. School taught me how to put software together, but I don’t think it ever taught me how to deal with licenses and open source.

The original license is GPLv3. So most of that is okay, but for the preview, I am using MIT Licensed CSS. So while I try to figure out open source licensing and deal with my solitary confinement, let me tell you the story of the Markdown editor I wanted to keep just for myself.