Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

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

<< < (71/244) > >>

Nod5:
General reflection (if I may, Dormouse let me know if you think I'm taking things too off-topic).

I'd love to see a comparison review of these markdown/plaintext "information management apps or systems" (not sure what the best term is) e.g. HackMD, CodiMD, Obsidian and others. First in regard to editing single files (syntax highlighting, shortcuts, autocompletion, ...) but second and more importantly comparison of features for global search, tagging, replacing and organizing the information.

One particular feature I've been thinking about is inclusion/transclusion.

Some apps offer that feature in (extended) Markdown or Asciidoc or with extra tools like Pandoc. My experience or impression is that transcluded content only shows up in these kinds of apps in preview mode and/or generated output, like .html or .pdf.

But I'm curious if some app also offers a third, mid-level mode or view.

1 raw view: the editor shows all syntax unresolved. So transclusion syntax is shown as for example "{{B.md}}". The user has to in a separate step open B.md to see its content, for example "hello world".

2 preview: the editor resolves all syntax, including seamlessly showing transcluded content.

3 transclude view: (this is the feature I'm looking for) the editor resolves only transclusions but no other markdown syntax. For example the editor shows "**weather**" (unresolved) but shows "hello world" (resolved transcluded contents of B.md) instead of "{{B.md}}".

In transclude view edits to the transcluded content would directly edit the source (B.md).

In transclude view the editor/app syntax highlighter would mark transcluded lines with a vertical colored bar. This is necessary so the users knows that edits there will edit the transcluded source. The highlight bar could show parent/child structure: bar on right side = content transcluded into this document; bar on left side = content transcluded from this document into other document). We could also imagine ways to interact with the transcluded content via such highlighting (click bar to open/jump to source; shortcuts to fold/unfold transcluded content; ...)

That could be useful for non-programming, personal use.

To expand, when coding it is often good to not all the time see the content of includes, as it would clutter the code we want to work on. We mostly just use the functions/methods and look up the source of the include only when needed. The imported modules are relatively fixed with a specific purpose. In contrast, for non-coding personal usage we might want to see the transcluded content most of the time while editing. For example when editing shed_build_plan.md we might want to see the resolved contents of hardware_tools_inventory.md most of the time. As a reminder to ourselves and also as context to surrounding text.

A halfway measure along these lines would be something like what the Peek feature in VS Code does for functions/methods/variables, but for non-resolved transclude syntax in Markdown.

Or a more complex version: some extra syntax for the transclude syntax gives case by case control over if and how to resolve it in transclude view (full resolve; resolve as embedded X lines high editbox with scroolbar; resolve only as mouseover tooltip peek; no resolve).

Dormouse:
*[] Read all the Andy Matuschak references from Panzer
*[] Work out sequence for evaluating text editors
*[] Check out Typora, Obsidian,  Texts, HackMD and CodiMD

So how long before BBCode goes markdown? Or rather forums simply switch to markdown.

wraith808:
Yes, quite a bit.  So much so that I pay for it.  I'm writing my book in it (it has a book type layout), and I thought reading this thread the autolinking feature would be nice for this system.
-wraith808 (May 27, 2020, 04:54 PM)
--- End quote ---

Cool! Do you have a view on the difference between HackMD and CodiMD? AFAICT they started out as the same project, but CodiMD is a FOSS fork. Confusingly HackMD github seem to still have a (competing) CodiMD repo.

https://hackmd.io/
https://github.com/hackmdio

https://github.com/codimd
https://demo.codimd.org/features#
-Nod5 (May 28, 2020, 05:47 AM)
--- End quote ---


I didn't see offhand where codimd supports book mode, which is my major use of hackmd.  And some other features, like workspaces.  And that's just from a cursory look.

And there's the fact that the active domain is demo.codimd.org- it seems that it's supposed to be self-hosted, and I'm not interested in self hosting it, and if it's not supposed to be self-hosted, then that domain would still make me shy away from actual use for anything.

Looking a bit closer, it even speaks to it:

It is inspired by Hackpad, Etherpad and similar collaborative editors. This project originated with the team at HackMD and now forked into its own organisation.
--- End quote ---

Emphasis mine.

Longer explanation at https://github.com/codimd/server/blob/407c53b9d9c463782c130c1f804d0f5af1fc2539/docs/history.md

wraith808:
*[] Read all the Andy Matuschak references from Panzer
*[] Work out sequence for evaluating text editors
*[] Check out Typora, Obsidian,  Texts, HackMD and CodiMD

So how long before BBCode goes markdown? Or rather forums simply switch to markdown.
-Dormouse (May 28, 2020, 07:02 AM)
--- End quote ---

Some forums and other social media already use Markdown (see *Diaspora and Discourse)

wraith808:
3 transclude view: (this is the feature I'm looking for) the editor resolves only transclusions but no other markdown syntax. For example the editor shows "**weather**" (unresolved) but shows "hello world" (resolved transcluded contents of B.md) instead of "{{B.md}}".

-Nod5 (May 28, 2020, 06:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

I learned something.  Never heard of transclusion before.  For any in that same boat: Transclusionw

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page