A while ago, I covered one of my favourite text editing tools: Hemingway.

Hemingway is great for me as a non-English native speaker, as it really helps with structuring text in a way that is tidy and easy to read. One great feature of the desktop version of Hemingway is that it can save files in .md and .html format. Unfortunately though, it does not save in UTF-8, which is required by Jekyll on Github Pages .

I had first planned to use Hemingway, export my files as .md, then convert them to UTF-8 and add them to my posts folder. This process takes ages and is not a convenient way of doing things, so I moved to a new tool: Remarkable.

First, I have a confession to make: I hate markdown. Well, I don’t really hate it, I just don’t think it’s easier than using a WYSIWYG editor. Yeah, moving around with a mouse is slower than doing everything with a keyboard. But typing double the digits to add formatting isn’t that convenient, and I need a preview of what I am writing that shows the formatted text.

Remarkable does exactly that: it has a typing area that works both with typing formatting commands and a WYSUWYG editor, and a preview area.

This is especially useful for links, images, and code formatting, where nested elements can get out of hand if I try to do it all in a plan text editor.

Remarkable screenshot

So here is my new workflow:

  1. Type my new blog posts in the Hemingway app;
  2. Edit any sentence that Hemingway doesn’t like, until I get at least a “good” rating;
  3. Copy the text over to Remarkable;
  4. Adjust formatting, add links and images;
  5. Save and publish!

The best part is that Remarkable is free, Github markdown compatible, and supports both on Windows and Linux, so I can follow the same workflow regardless of which OS I am using.

Note: you may be wondering what kind of person uses Ubuntu (or any Linux version) and hates markdown. Well, I like to explore and try new things, and I need a lightweight OS for my laptop; but I also like intuitive and accessible user interfaces. I am a big fan of “the less time it takes you to learn how to do a thing, the better”.