Introducing a Rust Program for a Web-Based Markdown Editor with Live Preview

Elijah Koulaxis

April 2, 2023

I just finished creating a new program in Rust that I'm excited to share with you all. It took a good amount of hours debugging and trying out different approaches.

The goal of this program is to create a simple web-based Markdown editor that allows you to edit a Markdown file on your local machine using an IDE or text editor, and see a live preview of the rendered HTML in your web browser.

Rust-Markdown

So how does it work? Well, the program is built using the Actix-Web framework, and it utilizes some other Rust libraries for parsing and rendering Markdown (pulldown_cmark). Whenever you save changes to the Markdown file in your IDE or text editor, the program automatically updates the preview in your web browser using a polling mechanism to check for updates and the pulldown_cmark library to render the Markdown into HTML.

polling

Under the hood, the program uses Rust's concurrency primitives to manage shared state between the different parts of the program. It uses a Mutex and an Arc to ensure that the Markdown is always in a consistent state and can be accessed by multiple threads at once.

Overall, I'm really happy with how this program turned out. It was a fun challenge to build, and I learned a lot about Rust and web development along the way. If you're interested in checking it out for yourself, you can check out my repo!

Check out the repo here.

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