Our beloved Open Source markdown editor Monod reached a huge milestone this week with the release of its version 4! In this article, we present some notable changes as well as a brand new documentation!

A few months ago, Monod started as a “hack week” project, followed by a second session to make it cool. It received a warm welcome we could not have imagined (front page on Hacker News for a whole day, many comments, GitHub stars, <insert usual vanity metrics here>).

We learnt React and a bunch of recent JavaScript tools and libraries by building Monod, and this is still the case. Monod is an open source project we use quite a lot internally, and we like to hack on it time to time to test new things. According to our stats, Monod is used by many people around the world every week, which is really amazing!

Thanks to Monod and some other projects, we are now able to develop beautiful and well-tested web interfaces in an efficient manner. Yet, Monod was our very first project and the code was not that great. Last summer, we decided to fix it and to have fun with such a code base! Monod v4 was born.

What’s New?

Now that we use Redux in every project, it was important to refactor Monod to use it. It has been done in #173. Keeping dependencies up to date was tedious before we met Greenkeeper. Now, we have it enabled on (almost) all projects, and we love it! Well, except when it sends multiple failing PRs because it does not solve peerDependencies but that is another story for another time. Seriously, you should give this service a try!

In our “developer life”, we did this “refactoring to add Redux” two times, in two different projects. Every time, the code base got way better, and its size reduced. We felt more comfortable with the whole project, and started to add many new features. For instance, we are big fans of GitHub task lists, and wanted to know how this feature could be implemented. It turned out that it was not too complicated:

With the help of external contributors and lovely users, we were able to add many other improvements like shortcuts, new syntax extensions, BibTeX support, and so on! You can find the full GitHub release here. Last but not least, we wrote a new documentation in a Monod read-only (#yeswecan) document! We also published an example of a slide deck built with Monod. Thanks everyone





PS: we have labeled some issues with the hacktoberfest label and we welcome everyone to support and celebrate Open Source in October (and beyond)!