Preview: Live Edit – Feedback wanted!

I just threw a POC together running the visual part of the Material for MkDocs stack in-browser. This would omit the need to install anything via pip or docker, as tech writers could just use the in-browser live editor to instantly preview their changes:

I’m astonished myself how fast this is. A live video showing the instantaneous rendering can be watched here: https://twitter.com/squidfunk/status/1338252230265360391

Any feedback is appreciated. Would you consider this useful? How would your ideal workflow look like?

[squidfunk]

Thank you all again for your great and detailed feedback! I’ve decided to discontinue the work on this idea, for now. I’m currently not seeing when and how I could find enough time to build an MVP out of this, as there’s a lot of hidden complexity that would need to be addressed. Furthermore, this project, as Material for MkDocs itself, would be an endless stream of adding support for more and more features, plugins, and workflows, and I’m afraid I can’t maintain two projects of this magnitude. This project alone already keeps me busy most weekends.

Maybe sometime in the future, we can revisit this idea, or somebody with enough spare time on their hands pulls it off 😊

[squidfunk]

Instead of generating the entire project (like mkdocs serve), it would need to render the current page only, it is that what you’re thinking of?

Exactly. It would be something like a supercharged Markdown Preview, i.e. for getting a preview of the current page. It will never replace MkDocs as a build system, so it won’t show navigation or other parts of the theme - only the content area. This is solely meant to make the write & preview cycle as fast as possible.

At the beginning it will only support stock Material styles. Later, it can pull in information from mkdocs.yml to apply customizations (extra CSS and maybe JS), and configuration values (primary and accent colors, extra icons, etc…) It may never support all of Material for MkDocs, but it could be a 95% good enough solution that takes a lot of pain away.