Provide Markdown Preview mode using folded source and phantom

[random-simon]

I’d like to know whether it makes sense to provide a new markdown preview mode. A new plugin to hide the Markdown source and display a rendered preview in the same Sublime Text tab view. It’s similar to vscode markdown preview mode.

Idea is from the gbird’s post . This approach is to provide formatted Markdown preview directly inside the original Sublime Text view. It preserves the markdown source in the text buffer, but fold and hide it temporarily and replacing its visual presentation with a read-only minihtml phantom.

The design is simple:

…folded Markdown source…
┌────────────────────────────┐
│      Phantom Preview       │
└────────────────────────────┘

And user can toggle the phantom review by some kind of button or command.

The screenshot here has folded source code and use minihtml to render a markdown preview.

Folding the markdown source isn’t elegant. But could provide a way to display the preview over the original source code without making major changes.

[gbird]

I can certainly see value in this, esp. when it comes to visual presentation of complex layout like MD tables.

One thing that VSCODE does well is the live side-by-side preview of MD documents. This might bridge the gap somewhat, although it might add some friction, with toggling between “Edit Source” and preview.

It might be better as a separate column/view, so you could get a true live-as-you-type preview.

But I wouldn’t use me as a case-study - my practices are very highly tuned for the work I do (create eLearning content for LMS systems like Moodle).

Locally I have sorted this problem with a modified version of OmniMarkupPreviewer, which I had to re-tool for py3.14 support.

This combo works really really for me, as I use a lot of HTML snippets that include Bootstrap for layout. This way, I get a true, live in the browser rendering, which I fully appreciate is a very niche set of requirements and beyond any rational expectation of an editor.