Markdown live preview in Textarea?

Question

Are there any Javascript Markdown editing toolbars or libraries that show the live preview within the textarea and hide the formatting marks (**, ___ etc), similar to TinyMCE's implementation?

If not, how would I go about implementing this in jQuery?

I'm currently using MarkItUp, which only shows the preview after the textarea, or in a pop-up.

This post refering to 'BlueCloth' sounds close, but although im interested in general implementation a RoR version isn't very useful at this stage (I'm using Python/Zope).

I'm aware that most of the beauty of Markdown is it's simple text formatting characters, but the site in question is fairly non-technical and I'm largely using the Markdown Python library for it's 'evil' html stipping abilities.

UPDATE: In response to comments, I suppose I'd be happy for the formatting marks to display if typed, but not if the toolbar is used (i.e. I'm assuming GUI users are less technical users).

Or, other toolbars have a 'source' view, which might be an option.

Answer 1

if you need markdown support right in textarea with no additional GUI, then textarea-markdown might be helpful