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I use markdown for note-taking. I do as much reading as editing, and they're generally intertwined. I don't want to switch between "view mode" and "edit mode".

I use markdown for note-taking. I do as much reading as editing, and they're generally intertwined. I don't want to switch between "view mode" and "edit mode". I want to be able to embed links but not have the document become cluttered with long, ugly URLs. I want to use headlines and bulleted lists and have them auto-formatted. I also want to keep my notes in a 100% portable human-readable format. (No MS Word, no Bear, no Evernote, etc.) For my use, the best solution is an app that shows me the formatted (styled) output, until I navigate the insertion point into it, and then expands the text to show the formatting. Obsidian is an app that does this. I don't love other parts of it, but the editing experience works well. (What I really want is the search/browse experience of nvUltra with the editing experience and cross-platform presence of Obsidian.)

kragen 2y ago
this only partially addresses your complaint, but you may or may not be aware that markdown has an option to put urls in footnotes, which you can put anywhere in the file: (This is part of the background work for [Monnier’s paper with him about Elisp’s history][3] for HOPL ’20.) ... [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386324 (Evolution of Emacs Lisp, by Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber) in my .emacs.d/init.el i wrote a command https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L230 https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e... which inserts such a footnote link, linking the previous word to the link pasted from the clipboard. it auto-increments the footnote counter, initially setting it higher than any numbered footnote it finds in the file. i have it bound to the fairly horrible key ctrl-alt-]; successive presses of the key expand the link leftwards to include more words (it ought to use the selection as the link text if there is one, and to find an existing block of footnotes to add the footnote to if there is one, but i haven't implemented those features) the upshot of this is that in the above, after typing 'history', i pressed ctrl-alt-] and kept pressing ] until the link had engulfed monnier's name emacs markdown-mode does also automatically syntax-highlight links, headers, bulleted lists, italic, bold, typewriter code, and markdown linebreaks, and it has a command (the also rather horrible keybinding ctrl-c ctrl-o) to open a link. if the link is to a local file, it opens it in emacs rather than your browser. it also uses the tab key to expand and collapse headers, and of course it always has emacs's instantaneous full-text search. but the formatting is much uglier than obsidian's
taeric 2y ago
This sounds like an agreement, then? I get why WYSIWG is pleasing sometimes. Most of the time it is not what I would want during editing, though.

kragen 2y ago

this only partially addresses your complaint, but you may or may not be aware that markdown has an option to put urls in footnotes, which you can put anywhere in the file: (This is part of the background work for [Monnier’s paper with him about Elisp’s history][3] for HOPL ’20.) ... [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386324 (Evolution of Emacs Lisp, by Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber) in my .emacs.d/init.el i wrote a command https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L230 https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e... which inserts such a footnote link, linking the previous word to the link pasted from the clipboard. it auto-increments the footnote counter, initially setting it higher than any numbered footnote it finds in the file. i have it bound to the fairly horrible key ctrl-alt-]; successive presses of the key expand the link leftwards to include more words (it ought to use the selection as the link text if there is one, and to find an existing block of footnotes to add the footnote to if there is one, but i haven't implemented those features) the upshot of this is that in the above, after typing 'history', i pressed ctrl-alt-] and kept pressing ] until the link had engulfed monnier's name emacs markdown-mode does also automatically syntax-highlight links, headers, bulleted lists, italic, bold, typewriter code, and markdown linebreaks, and it has a command (the also rather horrible keybinding ctrl-c ctrl-o) to open a link. if the link is to a local file, it opens it in emacs rather than your browser. it also uses the tab key to expand and collapse headers, and of course it always has emacs's instantaneous full-text search. but the formatting is much uglier than obsidian's

taeric 2y ago

This sounds like an agreement, then? I get why WYSIWG is pleasing sometimes. Most of the time it is not what I would want during editing, though.