Could you install PanWriter?

General system Applications
1

I know Electron sucks, but I have to give PanWriter a quick test, so I thought I’d use my new EOS system.

Did anyone of you succeed installing it, ideally under Cinnamon?
Pandoc is installed here (and works fine).

$ yay -Ss panwriter
aur/panwriter-bin 0.8.9-1 (+1 0.21) 
    Markdown editor with pandoc integration and paginated preview.(Prebuilt version.Use system-wide electron)
aur/panwriter 0.8.6-1 (+1 0.00) (Verwaist) (Veraltet: 2025-03-03) 
    Markdown editor with pandoc integration and paginated preview

panwriter-bin complains here:

$ panwriter --help
Error loading or parsing YAML file.ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/matthias/.config/PanWriter/settings.yaml'
APPIMAGE env is not defined, current application is not an AppImage

After trying to create an empty settings.yaml:

$ touch ~/.config/PanWriter/settings.yaml

$ panwriter 
APPIMAGE env is not defined, current application is not an AppImage

For about a tenth second, a small window pops up and vanishes again—unreadable.

I do have appimagelauncher installed, but disabled its file watcher daemon.

2

You don’t want to give the AppImage a shot?

3

Lol, I probably should… Just thought “the usual” would be better with EOS (i.e. 1st Official Repos, 2nd AUR).

5

Yeah, but the little I can understand from reading PKGBUILDS and the like, it looks that it unpacks the AppImage downloaded from the GitHub and install the binary and other files into the appropriate paths in the file system. So you’ll get the same thing but differently packaged and delivered.

6

Let me give that (AppImage) a quick spin…

7

You need fuse3 (I think it is) for the AppImages to run. But perhaps you already have that installed.

8

Yep fuse is installed:

$ pacman -Qs fuse
local/confuse 3.3-4
    C-library for parsing configuration files
local/fuse-common 3.17.1-1
    Common files for fuse2/3 packages
local/fuse2 2.9.9-5
    Interface for userspace programs to export a filesystem to the Linux kernel
local/fuse3 3.17.1-1
    Interface for userspace programs to export a filesystem to the Linux kernel
local/python-defusedxml 0.7.1-7
    XML bomb protection for Python stdlib modules
local/squashfuse 0.6.1-1
    FUSE filesystem to mount squashfs archives

Looks like there’s something wrong with the AppImage maybe (too bad). AppImageLauncher integrated it (moved to ~/Applications and made a menu entry, but now it shows another error when starting manually:

$ /home/matthias/Applications/PanWriter-0.8.9-arm64_c2eb1f525610ccc746280a7c89c12c36.AppImage --no-sandbox
[appimage-binfmt-bypass/bin] ERROR: failed to execute patched runtime: Exec format error

(I used the same command AppImageLauncher created for the menu entry.)

EDIT: Me idiot! Got the ARM version, accidentally! Moment…

9

Yes. I was just writing about that.

Here: https://github.com/mb21/panwriter/releases/download/v0.8.9/PanWriter-0.8.9.AppImage

10

Me idiot, indeed—must have been totally blind! :rofl:

Awfully sorry for the noise—the correct AppImage works, now for testing…

Hey, and thanks for your help!

1 Like
11

Happy testing!

1 Like
12

Quick results: The idea, layout and use of Pandoc are nice, but I scrapped it again.

Why:

  • Gets stuck on start when run with --no-sandbox.
  • Starts in sandboxed mode, but no export menu, no good font selection.
  • No meremaid in preview (and export, I believe).

Too bad, I liked the idea. An older version ran ok on my Mint desktop, but 0.8.9 had the same problems as on EOS.

Maybe somewhen in the future, but I have the feeling development has slowed down to almost nil.

13

Maybe something like Quarto would be better?

You could author with neovim in plain text markdown or your favorite editor. The recommended setup from their documentation gives you the markdown preview as well as a lot of other goodies.