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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

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Dormouse:
Also briefly tested the txt-as-md plugin on a test vault.
My interest was Obsidian commands rather than markdown,  but successfully inserted a transclusion into the txt file.
Will save a smidgen of time when exporting from Diarium and a heapfull if want simultaneous access from a program that won't read md.

Dormouse:
txt-as-md plugin
-Dormouse (March 19, 2021, 05:00 PM)
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And have realised that for my workflow this is a game changer. I've always written text with formatting to be done later. I like doing all my reviewing and editing using colours, comments etc. All the programs that will do that are happy to work with .txt files (though they won't save such extras in a .txt file), which means that I can convert nearly all my .md files to .txt and gain the ability to use them all, with no loss of Obsidian features. If I have to save files for a while in an extra word processing format until edits are completed, it's only what I always have to do anyway, and this way there's no converting backwards and forwards to do. The plugin works in mobile too.
And all the files collected originally in .txt format can go straight in to the vault without conversion.

Nod5:
Also briefly tested the txt-as-md plugin on a test vault.
-Dormouse (March 19, 2021, 05:00 PM)
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That's interesting. I see in https://forum.obsidian.md/t/handle-edit-other-plain-text-file-formats-rmarkdown-tex-txt-code-etc/1656/50 that there is discussion about two possible features.
1. Have Obsidian read .txt (and other plaintext) files as if markdown (apply markdown styling, and so on)
2. Have Obsidian read .txt as plain plaintext (no markdown styling)

The plugin does 1 AFAICT. But if this gets wings perhaps both 1 and 2 will get implemented, and maybe also a further feature
3. Have Obsidian read files with extension .NNN as some other, perhaps user customized plaintext format that differs from markdown. For example, AsciiDoc.
That is, users would in a config file tell Obsidian to treat filetypes {.md, .txt} as MarkDown, {.asciidoc, .adoc, .asc} as AsciiDoc, and so on.

Obsidian would expand to be a more general system-of-plaintext-notes editor/viewer. Compare to how VS Code is an editor/viewer for code in different programming languages. That ties in with our previous discussions here for/against the markdown format(s) and alternatives to it.

wraith808:
Obsidian would expand to be a more general system-of-plaintext-notes editor/viewer. Compare to how VS Code is an editor/viewer for code in different programming languages. That ties in with our previous discussions here for/against the markdown format(s) and alternatives to it.
-Nod5 (March 23, 2021, 05:11 AM)
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I think a lot of this relates to the direction the developers want to take the application. I haven't seen any indication that they want to make it a general purpose application.

Dormouse:
1. Have Obsidian read .txt (and other plaintext) files as if markdown (apply markdown styling, and so on)
2. Have Obsidian read .txt as plain plaintext (no markdown styling)

The plugin does 1 AFAICT. But if this gets wings perhaps both 1 and 2 will get implemented, and maybe also a further feature
3. Have Obsidian read files with extension .NNN as some other, perhaps user customized plaintext format that differs from markdown. For example, AsciiDoc.
-Nod5 (March 23, 2021, 05:11 AM)
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The plugin does 1, but only partially. It does 2 in the absence of any markdown in the file; up to a point. I'm not convinced that the holes in these will ever fully filled, but I see no chance of 3, although there must be a possibility that a plugin could be written to do this to some extent, maybe.

The plugin allows .txt to follow markdown styling. It allows links and transclusions, in .txt files. It doesn't allow .txt to be read natively or to be transcluded itself, and links to .txt files have to be typed out in full. Neither are tags in .txt recognised and nor do .txt files appear in graphs. Having hit these limits, I am now wondering how much use I will be able to make of it. For some things it will work fine, but not being able to be transcluded means that the technique of embedding chapters into a file to produce a complete MSS won't work. Of course, there's no difficulty in renaming them all at that point but working out which format to work in at each stage doesn't seem straightforward now; quite a collection of swings and roundabouts.

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