Hi,

you may have noticed (and hopefully you haven’t because I went back and tried to correct all of them) that I have made a loot spelling mistakes in my past posts (and a lot of grammar mistakes as well but as I am not a native English speaker, I may have some problems with that). One reason for that was the method how I wrote my posts. Normally I was sitting in front of a windows 7 machine, sshing into my server via putty and just wrote down what I wanted to say. This often caused some input lag which meant I often had up to one second between the keystroke and the screen showing the key. The program I used on the server was just old plain nano so no spell checking, no nice cut and past and so on. The $\LaTeX$-Code was compiled with TexMaker and then copy and pasted into the file.

Looking for a better solution I found ReText

ReText has basically everything I needed.

  • native markdown support
  • spell checking by hunspell
  • MathJax support
  • even a WYSIWYG preview system

To get my posts onto my server, I went with SSHFS which is a way to mount remote folders via ssh.

Here are some things you might want to know if you want to do something similar:

SSHFS

mounting

sshfs server:remote_dir local_dir

unmounting

fusermount -u local_dir

MathJax-Support

This is supported since version 4.

I had create a file ~/.config/markdown-extensions.txt and add the line mathjax to enable support for it

Arch-Linux

AUR has an ReText package but you will need some optional dependencies for the nicer features:

  • python-markdown -> needed for markdown preview mode
  • python-pyenchant -> needed for spell checking

These you will find in the normal repos so just install them with pacman like normal.

You will also need the hunspell package for the language you choose. ReText has a bit of a crude language setting, you just tip the name of the package, as an Example:

  • en_US for American English
  • de_DE for German as written in Germany

As I said, make sure you have the hunspell package for it installed

I think, enough is said, try it out. I personally like it very much, only problem I have up to now is that I cannot switch between tabs and spaces. But I guess there is a option for that somewhere.