ReText (Text Editor For MarkDown Syntax) Now Supports Tabs, Live Previews, More

ReText is a simple text editor for MarkDown syntax that supports some popular formats such as PDF, ODT, HTML and plain text. Using ReText you can even export your documents to Google Docs (but for now, each export creates a new document).

Since our last post about it, ReText got some very interesting new features:

• Tabs support
• "Live preview" (screenshot)
• Ability to select the default font
• Showing Markdown documentation on first run
• "Web-pages generator"
• Better highlighter for HTML
• KDE integration
• Lots of other changes

The ReText wiki provides a short how-to for using the new "web pages generator" feature.


Here are some screenshots featuring the latest ReText 1.0 under GNOME and KDE:

Install ReText 1.0 in Ubuntu

Add the ReText PPA and install the latest ReText 1.0 in Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mitya57
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retext

Download ReText 1.0 source code.

Thanks to Dmitry Shachnev for the info and second screenshot!

ReText: Text Editor That Supports Exporting To PDF, ODT, HTML And Google Docs

ReText is a new, simplistic text editor for MarkDown syntax that supports some popular formats such as PDF, ODT, HTML and plain text. Unfortunately you can only export to these file formats (so you can't use it to open a PDF or ODT file but it does work for HTML) but even so, ReText is quite a handy application.

Further more, ReText lets you export your documents to Google Docs. For now, each export creates a new document because "Document replacing API is available in gdata3, which is in Labs for now", says the ReText developer.

Install ReText in Ubuntu

ReText comes with an Ubuntu PPA for easy installation so if you use Ubuntu (10.04 or newer), open a terminal and copy/paste the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mitya57
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retext

If you're not using Ubuntu, you can grab the ReText source @ Sourceforge.

Thanks to Dmitry for the tip!