KeenWrite VS kroki

Compare KeenWrite vs kroki and see what are their differences.

KeenWrite

Free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown text editor with live preview, string interpolation, and math. (by DaveJarvis)
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KeenWrite kroki
98 49
621 2,669
- 4.3%
0.0 8.8
7 months ago 3 days ago
Java JavaScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

KeenWrite

Posts with mentions or reviews of KeenWrite. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-16.
  • Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on
    68 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Aug 2023
    KeenWrite is my free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown editor that can produce beautifully typeset PDFs. I started working on it years ago to help write a novel that has a complex timeline and I couldn't find a text editor that would allow me to integrate a character sheet with the story itself.

    https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

    Tutorials:

    * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

    Here's what I mean by using variables directly:

    * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCqe3A5dFg

    CommonMark doesn't propose a standard for bibliographic references. Would anyone find the editor more appealing if it had cross-references and citations?

  • Documentation as Code for Cloud Using PlantUML
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2023
    My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

    KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

    * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

    * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

    KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

    [1]: https://kroki.io/

    [2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

    [3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

  • On why Markdown is not a good, or even a half-decent, markup language
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jul 2023
  • MdBook – Create book from Markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust
    30 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jun 2023
  • KeenWrite 3.3.2: MermaidJS diagrams (with caveat)
    1 project | /r/Markdown | 24 Jun 2023
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jun 2023
  • Interactive CommonMark Tutorial
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jun 2023
    Although not interactive, I've created a video series that shows advanced usage of Markdown. Namely R, external variables, diagrams, math, annotations, and a different approach to metadata:

    * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

    Tutorial 4 shows basic Markdown:

    * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

    The top-right of each video shows keyboard and mouse clicks to help follow along.[1] My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[2], is used in the tutorials.

    [1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster

    [2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

  • “Exit Traps” Can Make Your Bash Scripts Way More Robust and Reliable
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2023
    https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/scripts/bu...

    My template script provides a way to make user-friendly shell scripts. In a script that uses the template, you define the dependencies and their sources:

        DEPENDENCIES=(
  • EchoSVG: SVG rasterizer library supporting level 4 selectors (Apache 2)
    4 projects | /r/java | 8 Jun 2023
    I didn't create the fork, nor am I affiliated with the project. I use it in my text editor, KeenWrite to rasterize SVG.
  • Millions of dollars in time wasted making papers fit journal guidelines
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2023
    KeenWrite Themes[1] are instructions that tell ConTeXt how to typeset XHTML documents (content) into PDF files (presentation). I made a tutorial that shows how my FOSS desktop text editor, KeenWrite[3], allows users to write in Markdown to typeset a document against a particular theme.

    Before it can be used for scientific papers, it needs cross-references, which, unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.

    I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on TeX.SE about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to tweak each list ... individually.[4] The correct answer, IMO, is to fix the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual lists.

    [1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes

    [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30

    [3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

    [4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-be...

kroki

Posts with mentions or reviews of kroki. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-14.
  • WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
    Your wish showing up in the face of a submission just 14 days ago and then another 29 days ago must be indicative of why there are so many dupes all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kroki.io

    You can feel free to submit the GH repo, as that one doesn't seem to have been submitted before https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki

  • D2 Playground
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Mar 2024
    Pikchr https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow is the other general purpose one and older than d2. It is "Source-Code License: 0-clause BSD" as it says on the page.

    Someone made it into wasm and put playground for pikchr here https://www.jakethaw.com/pikchr_webassembly_demo/

    Can also try pikchr online here on https://kroki.io/#try which is hosting many other text to diagram tools as well.

  • Mermaid Chart, a Markdown-like tool for creating diagrams, raises $7.5M
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Mar 2024
    I use mermaid.js heavily, but plug for Kroki:

    https://kroki.io/

    “Kroki provides a unified API with support for BlockDiag (BlockDiag, SeqDiag, ActDiag, NwDiag, PacketDiag, RackDiag), BPMN, Bytefield, C4 (with PlantUML), D2, DBML, Ditaa, Erd, Excalidraw, GraphViz, Mermaid, Nomnoml, Pikchr, PlantUML, Structurizr, SvgBob, Symbolator, TikZ, UMLet, Vega, Vega-Lite, WaveDrom, WireViz... and more to come!”

  • Kroki: A unified API to create any kind of diagram from text
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2024
  • Kroki – Creates diagrams from textual descriptions
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2023
  • How to draw beautiful software architecture diagrams
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Oct 2023
  • Nomnoml
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Oct 2023
    If you don't mind my asking, what aspects of "acceptable layout" is usually the first to get busted?

    I'm extremely excited about using WireViz[1] to automate wiring harness diagram creation, and if I can, I'd like to know the speedbumps before I hit them. I'm thinkin generous linking between diagrams will be one path.

    [1] Project:: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz SandboxP:: https://kroki.io/#try [select Diagram>WireViz]

  • LaTeX for publishing tabletop role-playing games
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2023
    The SVG output is embedded into the PDF file.

    https://kroki.io/examples.html#mind-map

    Kroki has other text-based formats for flow charts, Gantt charts, UML diagrams, packet diagrams, network diagrams, word clouds, etc.

  • Documentation as Code for Cloud Using PlantUML
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2023
    My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

    KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

    * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

    * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

    KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

    [1]: https://kroki.io/

    [2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

    [3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

  • Pikchr: A PIC-like markup language for diagrams in technical documentation
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing KeenWrite and kroki you can also consider the following projects:

markdown-preview.nvim - markdown preview plugin for (neo)vim

Mermaid - Edit, preview and share mermaid charts/diagrams. New implementation of the live editor.

marktext - 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

plantuml-syntax - vim syntax file for plantuml

typst - A new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.

plantuml - Generate diagrams from textual description

vim-markdown - Markdown Vim Mode

mermaid - Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown

Zettlr - Your One-Stop Publication Workbench

venn.nvim - Draw ASCII diagrams in Neovim

xenops - An editing environment for LaTeX mathematical documents