# SimpleMDE - Markdown Editor
A drop-in JavaScript textarea replacement for writing beautiful and understandable markdown. The WYSIWYG-esque editor allows users to modify the markdown with toolbar buttons and shortcuts. WYSIWYG editors that produce HTML are often complex and buggy. Markdown solves this problem in many ways, but is less visually clear while editing. SimpleMDE has been designed to bridge this gap for non-technical users who are less familiar with or just learning Markdown syntax.

![Preview](http://i.imgur.com/b9hFHFT.png)

## Quickstart
Available on [jsDelivr](http://www.jsdelivr.com/about.php)

```
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.jsdelivr.net/simplemde/1.1.1/simplemde.min.css">
<script src="http://cdn.jsdelivr.net/simplemde/1.1.1/simplemde.min.js"></script>
```

And then load SimpleMDE on the first textarea on a page

```
var simplemde = new SimpleMDE();
simplemde.render();
```

#### Use a specific textarea

Pure JavaScript method

```
var simplemde = new SimpleMDE(document.getElementById("MyID"));
simplemde.render();
```

jQuery method

```
var simplemde = new SimpleMDE($("#MyID")[0]);
simplemde.render();
```

## Get the content

```
simplemde.codemirror.getValue();
```

## Configuration

- **element**: The DOM element for the textarea to use. Defaults to the first textarea on the page.
- **status**: If set false, hide the statusbar. Defaults to true.
- **tools**: If set false, hide the toolbar. Defaults to true.

```
new SimpleMDE({
  element: document.getElementById("MyID"),
  status: false,
  tools: false,
});
```

## How it works
SimpleMDE is an improvement of [lepture's Editor project](https://github.com/lepture/editor) and includes a great many number of changes. It is bundled with [CodeMirror](https://github.com/codemirror/codemirror) and [Font Awesome](http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/).

CodeMirror is the backbone of the project and parses much of the markdown syntax as it's being written. This allows us to add styles to the markdown that's being written. Additionally, a toolbar and statusbar has been added to the top and bottom, respectively. Previews are rendered by [Marked](https://github.com/chjj/marked).

## What's changed?
As mentioned earlier, SimpleMDE is an improvement of [lepture's Editor project](https://github.com/lepture/editor). So you might be wondering, what's changed? Quite a bit actually. Here's some notable changes:

- Upgraded from CodeMirror 3 to CodeMirror 5
- Many changes to the style, appearance, and userfriendliness
- Interface more closely resembles Bootstrap
- Now mobile friendly
- The text editor now automatically grows as you type more
- Fixed a large amount of bugs
- Switched to Font Awesome icons
- Improved preview rendering in many ways
- Improved as-you-type appearance of headers and code blocks
- Simplified the toolbar