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Ask HN: Local Mac Wysiwyg HTML Editor? (for “Lo-fi” website)
16 points by dv35z on Oct 22, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
Hola!

After futzing with static site generators, and markdown/Obsidian publishing pipelines. I’m trying to get into writing - and making it part of a daily flow. I’ve really wanted to like using Obsidian, but I’m not a huge fan of the desktop app, and the mobile app takes too long to open - I’d like to try something else.

I want to take a swing at a simple folder of HTML files, which I rsync/SFTP to AWS S3. I’m posting how-to articles, blogs etc.

I’m looking for somewhat of a “lo-fi” solution. Local app, Not-cloud based, open-source preferred. I thought there was a VS Code plugin, but haven’t found it. I’d like to editing experience to be similar to editing Google Doc - as opposed in writing markdown/html tags. I frequently copy my notes into email, or exporting as PDF. An HTML doc is pretty good for that.

I was hoping to find an OSS version of Dreamweaver or something like that a but haven’t found it.

What do you suggest? I’d love to maintain the Obsidian-like cross linking ability… for now, I’m thinking to just put the HTML cross links in manually (unless you have better ideas)

Thanks!




Logseq, which is a note-taking app much like Obsidian, can also generate a static site from its notes natively. It has a mobile app, which is very helpful when you are on the move. It is quite idiosyncratic, but it works well if you know your way around it. https://discuss.logseq.com/t/how-to-publish-your-logseq-as-a....

Another option is Pinegrow, an NW.js desktop-based website development app that uses plain HTML, CSS, and JS, just like Dreamweaver. Its UI is quite complicated, but you can hide what's not necessary for you. It also includes a bare-bones CMS, but it's not mandatory to use. It's not open-source, though.


Logseq doesn't seem to be able to edit an HTML file. I checked out Logseq when I was considering Obsidian, and I found it quite complicated (it seems closer to Workflowy...). I'd love to see something like this succeed...

Pinegrow - this seems to be close to what I'm thinking... a visual HTML editor. But wow, the interface is complicated. Looks like they've crammed AI/ChatGPT into it, a news reader widget (?!). $150/year price tag. - A simple, open-source app along these lines would be great.


I run a content website for a living and I do everything in Markdown inside Sublime Text. It works really well, especially if you already use Sublime a lot.

I made a few color scheme changes to increase line height, limit line width, and improve header contrast. The MarkdownEditing plugin is also nice if you use special features like footnotes.


How do you actually render / style the Markdown documents, site?

I was thinking to lean into something similar with VS Code - the hypothesis being that VSC is widely used, open source, and a powerful text editor.

Have you / others come across similar plugins? I’d be OK with editing markdown files - would love using a GUI editor. I’m not a fan of writing in markdown with a separate rendered window to the side. Would rather it “feel” like a simple MS Word / Google Docs authoring experience.


Look for the more writing oriented editors like Ulysses. This might be closer to what you want.


Have you tried TextEdit? It supports both rich text editing and code editing.

https://support.apple.com/guide/textedit/work-with-html-docu...


I was surprised to see this functionality and tried it - it does technically work… but for authoring, the formatting tools don’t include styles (eg H1), just in-line formatting (bold, etc). I looked at the HTML output, and it added quite a bit of junk. Since TextEdit is quite basic, I disqualified it for this mission- as I’m looking for an authoring environment that I can comfortably & productively “live in” for an hour or two a day while writing. TextEdit’s HTMl mode seems more of a tacked on feature…


I don’t have any suggestions, just wanted to pop in and share my dismay that there doesn’t seem to be anything quite like what you’re looking for.

I started in plain HTML/refresh IE back in the day, and Dreamweaver (for all its many _many_ flaws) did a great job.

I really wonder how many young web engineers aren’t having their calling realized because of this simple gap - being able to write in a WYSIWYG editor and view the source, alter it, learn what the HTML and CSS were doing, and instantly see the results, was inspiring for me. I wonder how different it would’ve been to have the editor just push the work out to WordPress or whatever and never really get to see the inner workings.


Completely agree - without getting too dramatic, for such an important open standard (HTML) its surprising we don't have a open-source locally-run easy to use, visual authoring tool for HTML websites (and I'll throw Markdown in the mix here, because with tools like https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/markdeep/, useful crossover is possible).

Share this page with people who are passionate about this topic, and perhaps we can gather experts to rally behind an open-source initiative or start one.


Check out https://github.com/GetPublii/Publii


First off - this is a very interesting app, and the interface is clean. I think this would actually be useful in many contexts.

However, I'm looking for something that's less of a local CMS, and more of just... a document editor which can open up HTML files, edit them with a GUI interface, and save them somewhere.

Ideally, it would be an editor like Sublime, where you can drag a folder containing HTML files in there (so you can navigate folders and access other files & content), and edit visually...


One of the open source wysiwyg editors I have been trying to use is BlueGriffon. It does what you want. But it hasn't been updated for a while. I remember codeigniter soe something like that used to do that back in 2010s.


SeaMonkey has an HTML composer https://www.seamonkey-project.org/doc/features


I tried it today - I’ll be honest, it felt very janky on my Mac (2021 / M1). The GUI had rendering artifacts, several common unicode characters (eg right-arrow) rendered as glitchy characters. It didn’t feel like authoring HTML / sites is its core competency.


Barry Kauler uses this for his homespun ShellCMS:

https://bkhome.org/shellcms/


Wow, no one has mentioned Org mode (https://orgmode.org). I started using Emacs nearly 20 years ago specifically because of Org. I use Org for all my static sites, note taking, to-do lists and calendar. Org has a lightweight markup language that has far more features than Markdown (e.g., plain text spreadsheets!), but the markup isn't visible to the extent that Markdown is in most editors. Emacs with Org files behaves almost like a WYSIWYG editor. For example, links in Org files are clickable and their URLs aren't visible unless a cursor is hovered over them. I'm an obsessive note-taker with more than 6,000 Org files in my personal knowledge base and none of the dozens of other writing apps that I've evaluated comes close to Emacs with Org (given my requirements). But to be fair, I create content on Linux only so support for mobile devices doesn't matter to me.

By the way, it's funny that you mentioned Dreamweaver, dv35z, because I experimented with using Dreamweaver as a writing app in the 90s. I still have hundreds of HTML files that include notes and essays I wrote back then using Dreamweaver. Needless to say, I definitely prefer Emacs with Org!


I would love to give orgmode a chance. "On paper" Emacs sounded great to me. Last year, I gave it a few days time to try to get it to work - I just could not figure it out! It's been awhile since I tried it, but between the keyboard shortcuts, and "buffers", the various plugins to install and configure, and emacs felt slow (which surprised me, because I'd thought it would be extremely snappy, being a text app)... I'm sure if I sat down with a pro for 20 minutes, a lot of the blockers would be eliminated and could get to a productive state. If you can recommend resources, that result in an Org-Mode "easy mode", I'd love to check it out...

Emacs Org-mode is on my list technologies to check out which have stood the test of time, and may continue to do so...


I'd like the same but with one more deployment option: create a (simple) static site that doesn't require any web server. I started an old relative on Dreamweaver about 25 years ago thinking that simple HTML files would make a good, open, archival rich-text alternative to plaintext. He wrote many articles that can still be double-clicked and viewed on any platform today and are among the most likely doc formats to still be readable a century from now (if any still are).

I had hoped that simple HTML would become a better choice than PDF or MS-Word for ordinary people writing for posterity, but unlike old Dreamweaver, almost all HTML tools today produce docs that must be served by a web server (and consist of separate HTML, CSS, JS, img files that get scattered.)


Yes - this is what I’m aiming for. For example; I’m imagining an “article” is just a folder with HTML, with images & media within it - a self contained doc which ought to be usable for decades.


I found myself in the same situation a little while ago. The closest thing I found was MarsEdit: https://redsweater.com/marsedit/.


This looks interesting- have you tried it? What’s your experience been like?

Update: Just tried this out. It seems to require you already have a remote blog setup (e.g. Wordpress), and you can't make a local site of static HTML, nor can you just open an HTML file and edit it.


It seems 'Notebooks' fits your requirements: https://www.notebooksapp.com/

I'm currently on the hunt for a notes app and found that. It seems to be a notes app / static site generator wysiwyg that uses HTML.


https://coteditor.com

https://github.com/coteditor


Does it have a WYSIWYG editor mode? Looks like it just edits the code text, but doesn’t show the styled doc…?


Rapid Weaver maybe?

https://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/


This seems to be a local CMS - but you can't just edit "dumb" HTML files. Seems like a page has be inside of a blog/site you setup, and then the system "publishes" it. Looking for something thats not a blog publishing system - just a visual HTML document editor.


All are a bit old and in need of some TLC, but the Mozilla editor had a number of forks and continuations:

* Kompozer

* nVu

* BlueGriffon

(In that order, IIRC.)


- nVU - appears to be un-maintained, and last release was 2005.

- Kompozer - http://kompozer.net/ is offline, last update 2016

- BlueGriffon - just downloaded it. It doesn't seem to run - I just get a frame of an empty window...


Yes, they're all old, sadly.

The trendy way to do websites now is programmatically generated text, mostly from Javascript. So these are old school tools, but that seemed to be what you were asking for. Perhaps I was wrong.

I was replying on a phone, so no links or anything -- sorry.

I just downloaded and tried Blue Griffon on macOS Monterey (the latest my Mac will run unaided) and it worked fine and happily opened a local HTML file and displayed it. LGTM.

Seamonkey is active and currently supported. I still use it occasionally.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

It uses an old version of Gecko, though. It still has a web editor and it still works.

I just updated to:

SeaMonkey 2.53.17.1 Platform: macOS x64 Language: English (UK)


libreoffice can export to HTML, maybe not what you're looking for though


I gave LibreOffice an honest try - thinking that “I’ll tolerate a few warts, invest in my tools - especially open source”. I used it for 10 minutes, and decided to uninstall it. While editing a document, I got weird rendering errors, interface was jankt, things felt quite broken. I’m on a recent computer, with minimal special modifications- so who knows what the issues were, but didn’t leave a great first impression.

I’m currently using Apple Pages as my “local document editor” (eg for things to be printed), its fine - but doesn’t handle the “edit this HTML file cleanly” mission.


What exactly does lo-fi mean in this context?


In this context, favoring simple text files (markdown, HTML) instead of Javascript-enabled, server-side rendering. Tech that ought to last for 20+years. I imagine a 1990s-era office - wired connections (no flaky bluetooth connections, wired ethernet, simple local file servers; minimal cloud based service - can the people in the office be productive without Wifi/internet for a half day? Async tools, like local email clients instead of web-based ones).


Typora


I checked out Typora today - there are a lot of promising capabilities, especially as you can customize the theme / style sheets. Very cool app, that I would consider revisiting. Paid / requires a license, so its out of scope for this mission.




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