Building a Markdown Editor

In this chapter, we are going to build a minimal Markdown Editor application. This mini exercise is going to help you get an idea of how to build a web application that integrates with the Electron shell on desktops.

You are about to walk through the process of integrating a third-party editor component, learning how to support application menus, and establishing communication channels between the rendering (browser) and the main (Node.js) processes. We are doing this so that you become confident with Electron and can build more complex projects.

As part of this chapter, we will also create a new GitHub repository to store application releases, publish multiple versions of the Markdown Editor to GitHub, configure automatic updates, and see them in action.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Configuring a new project
• Integrating the editor component
• Fitting the screen size
• Integrating the application menu
• Adding drag and drop support
• Supporting automatic updates
• Changing the title of the application