To get started with this chapter, you will need a standard laptop or desktop running macOS, Windows, or Linux.

The software that you need to have installed for this chapter is as follows:

• Git, a version control system
• Node.js with node package manager (NPM)
• Visual Studio Code, a free and open-source code editor

You can find the code files for this chapter in this book's GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Electron-Projects/tree/master/Chapter02.

Let's start our journey by configuring a new Electron project and naming it markdown-editor since we are building a markdown editor application. You can create a corresponding folder with the following commands:

mkdir markdown-editor
cd markdown-editor

As you may recall from Chapter 1, Building Your First Electron Application, we need to initialize a new project with the npm init command. You should also install electron, the core library that provides an application shell. In addition, your project needs an electron-builder library, which allows you to publish and distribute features for multiple platforms. Let's get started:

1. Run the following commands to set up a new project:

      npm init -y
      npm i -D electron
      npm i -D electron-builder

The npm init command should generate a package.json file with the following content:

      {
...

For our project, we don't need to build everything from scratch, including the components that edit and format text in markdown format. There are lots of free, open source components you can use to save time and focus on building the application and delivering value to your users, rather than spending months reinventing the wheel.

For the sake of simplicity, we are going to use the SimpleMDE component, which stands for Simple Markdown Editor. You can find more details about the project on its home page: https://simplemde.com/. The project is open source and has an MIT license. Follow these steps to incorporate the component:

1. Similarly to how we installed the Electron framework itself, you can use NPM commands to get SimpleMDE into your project:

      npm install simplemde

If you keep experimenting with your application at runtime, you may notice that the editor component doesn't fit the whole application area once you start resizing the window or maximizing it. To address this, we need to add some CSS styles to tell the component it needs to fit the parent width and height.

Please note that, at the lower level, SimpleMDE wraps another great component called CodeMirror.

Here, we are going to add flex layout features to the whole body of the HTML base and add some styling support for the CodeMirror part, which is part of SimpleMDE. Let's get started:

1. Update the styles in the index.html...

As you already know, your application is essentially an HTML5 stack running inside Chromium, and Electron provides all necessary integration with the underlying operating system, whether that's macOS, Windows, or Linux.

The concept of application menus is slightly different across platforms. macOS, for instance, provides a single application menu that reflects the active application and displays the corresponding menu items. The Windows system tends to provide a separate menu for each instance of the application window. Finally, Linux systems usually vary based on the window manager's implementations.

Handling every case would be quite cumbersome for developers; that is why the Electron framework provides a unified interface for building application menus from the JSON definition and takes care of integration details.

Let's take...

Another nice feature you can provide for your small markdown editor application is the ability to drag and drop files onto the window. Users of your application should have the ability to drop a markdown file onto the editor's surface and have the content of the file immediately available to them. This scenario also helps us address some extra features of the Electron framework that you may use later. Let's get started:

1. The easiest way to enable drop support for an entire web page running in Electron is to set the ondrop event handler for the body element:

      <body ondrop="dropHandler(event);">
        <!-- page content -->
      </body>

2. For now, the drop handler implementation can be as simple as putting a message into the browser console's output. The most important part here is to prevent the default...

The electron-builder project that we are using with our Electron application also provides support for automatic updates. In this section, we will learn how to set up a GitHub repository so that we can store and distribute application updates.

Our Markdown Editor application is going to check for new versions on each start-up and notify users if a new version is available. Let's set up automatic updates for Electron applications:

1. First, let's create a new GitHub repository and call it electron-updates. Initialize it with the README file to save time cloning and setting up the initial content:

Throughout the whole process of application development, you may have noticed that our window is called Document, as shown in the following screenshot:

This is not an issue with the Electron framework; the title of the page comes from the <title> tag inside the index.html file:

Change the value of the title to something more meaningful, for example, My Markdown Application, and restart the application. You should see the new title, as follows:

Feel free to provide a different value for the name. Usually, it is the same value you are going to have in the package.json file, inside the name property.

In this chapter, we have successfully created a minimalistic markdown editor. We have walked through the process of integrating third-party editor components, wiring keyboard combinations, and performing messaging between the browser and Node.js parts of the Electron application. You should now have a better understanding of application deployments and automatic updates, as well as simple release management via the GitHub repository.

Then, you learned how to build a basic desktop application with system menu integration and access to the local filesystem. This is essentially the bare bones of a typical Electron project you are going to work on in the future. However, the Electron framework provides you with a wrapper around your web application. You still need to decide whether to use plain JavaScript, HTML, and CSS or employ an existing web framework to move faster. This...