May 31, 2026
Markdown or meltdown?
Show HN: Atomic Editor – Obsidian-style live preview for CodeMirror 6
This note-taking editor wowed fans, but the comments turned into a bug roast
TLDR: Atomic Editor is a new demo that makes plain-text note writing feel more visual, with live tables, checkboxes, and prettier code blocks. Commenters were split between “finally, this is promising” and “this breaks the second I touch it,” turning the launch into a praise-vs-bug-report showdown.
A new demo called Atomic Editor showed off a flashy way to write notes: links open neatly, tables behave like real tables, code gets colorful formatting, and checkboxes can be clicked right inside the page. In plain English, it’s trying to make raw markdown text feel smooth and visual without turning into a clunky word processor. That alone got people interested — especially fans of Obsidian, the beloved notes app this project is clearly chasing.
But the real show was in the comments, where praise and panic arrived at the same time. One camp was impressed, calling it something they’d wanted for years and praising how many tricky details it seemed to nail. Another camp came in with the digital equivalent of a fire alarm: one user said it seemed “very broken” and complained that text was jumping everywhere while typing. Another liked the idea but said the illusion falls apart fast, pointing to weird behavior when deleting code block markers and saying the “abstraction leaks” in tables — a very nerdy way of saying, “yep, I can see the magic trick failing.”
The spiciest mini-drama was over the choice of editing engine itself: one commenter politely asked why this was built on one text system instead of another, basically kicking off the classic “wrong tool?” debate. So the vibe was pure internet: half standing ovation, half public stress test, with a side of “I tried building this too.”
Key Points
- •Atomic Editor is a CodeMirror 6 markdown editor demo with Obsidian-style inline live preview.
- •Fenced code blocks use per-language syntax highlighting, and grammars are loaded lazily only when relevant fences are opened or appear on screen.
- •Tables are rendered WYSIWYG, and cells can be edited in place with markdown delimiters revealed only when the cursor enters.
- •Task lists are implemented as interactive checkboxes that can be toggled directly, with Enter key behaviors for continuing or dedenting lists.
- •Wiki links support `[[` autocomplete and can be opened with Cmd/Ctrl-click, while remaining raw inside inline code.