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Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

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Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#41

Post by colonial »

bradgessler wrote: post #22
verdverm wrote: post #14

> GitHub PRs are Markdown documents, and some organizations have specific templates with checklists for all reviewers to complete. Enforcing these often requires ugly regexes that are a pain to write and worse to debug This is because GitHub is not building the features we need, instead they are putting their energy towards the AI land grab. Bitbucket, by contrast, has a feature where you can block PRs using a checkb…

Not only is GitHub focused on AI, but they’re also making their UI slower and jankier by rewriting it in React. I feel like a “Linear for GitHub” is due.

Holy crap, is that why it's felt so syrupy recently? What was wrong with the old implementation?!

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#42

Post by kbd »

Cool thanks for sharing! I'll have to check this out. I've wanted something similar.

After trying a bunch of the usual ones, the only "notes system" I've stuck with is just a directory of markdown files that's automatically committed to git on any change using watchexec.

I've wanted to add a little smarts to it so I could use it to track tasks (eg. sort, prune completed, forward uncomplete tasks over to the next day's journal, collect tasks from "projects", etc.) so I started writing some Rust code using markdown-rs. Then, to round-trip markdown with changes, only the javascript version of the library currently supports serializing github flavored markdown. So then I actually dumped the markdown ast to json from rust and picked it up in js to serialize it for a proof of concept. That's about as far as I got so far. But while markdown-rs saves position information, it doesn't save source token information (like, * and - are both list items) so you can't reliably round-trip.

FWIW, the other thing I was hoping to do was treat markdown documents as trees (based on headings) use an xpath kind of language to pull out sections. Anyway, will check out your code, thanks for posting.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#43

Post by ta8903 »

twinkjock wrote: post #40
imglorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, which license can't you use at work for a simple shell tool? Considering you're not linking against it, even GPL3 should be okay, right?

Most big employers consider GPL unusable and will only allow Apache, MIT, BSD, and other permissive patent-free licenses.

So they don't let you use grep? Sounds like hell.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#44

Post by groby_b »

sorrythanks wrote: post #32
bradgessler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is GitHub focused on AI, but they’re also making their UI slower and jankier by rewriting it in React. I feel like a “Linear for GitHub” is due.

https://pierre.co/

Uh... I have no idea what that was, just that the design is completely counter to any attempt to read it.

Which means, probably not a good replacement workflow for a daily driver.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#45

Post by sauercrowd »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #36
nicce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that it is React’s fault? Is there any other replacement for heavy user interaction, that is clearly more performative? You cannot do that on server side.

Yes, there are lots of better options. React is around the bottom 25th percentile of frameworks when comparing speed. https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2025/table...

In my experience performance issues in React also creep in without it being obvious when developing, especially across a larger team. It tends to be more obvious with server-side frameworks like django or rails.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#46

Post by threecheese »

Interesting; one thing you may have learned researching existing tools and libraries: many of them serialize markdown to html before running structured extraction/manipulation - even stuff like converting to pdf.

The core assumption here is that Markdown was/is designed to be serializeable to html - this is why a markdown document/AST is mostly not a tree structure, for tree-ish elements such as sub-sections. Instead, it is flat, an array of elements in order of appearance in the document. Apparently this most closely matches the structure of html, at both the block and inline levels. Only Lists and Blockquotes (afair) support nesting.

Ex: h1 -> paragraph -> h2 -> paragraph is not nested, it is an array of four ordered elements.

Anyway, you might throw a task at Cursor or Copilot to see how an equivalent implementation using html fares against your test suite, you may be able to develop more quickly.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#47

Post by cmddds »

jvanderbot wrote: post #25
hamandcheese wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub was ignoring users needs long before the AI craze.

It's hard to remember, but as soon as gitlab showed up, GitHub went from a "maybe someday if I make it" site to a "let's just use GitHub for everything" site. Prior to gitlab ratcheting up the usability, features, and cost effectiveness, I preferred hosted git for 99% of use cases.

I just started using git, can you give me some advice?

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#48

Post by troupo »

simonw wrote: post #30
nicce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that it is React’s fault? Is there any other replacement for heavy user interaction, that is clearly more performative? You cannot do that on server side.

GitHub worked great for 15+ years without React everywhere. I'm finding interacting with issues to be a whole lot jankier over the past few months.

IIRC only search is React. Everything else is still Hotwire or Hotwire-like, with numerous bugs

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#49

Post by kqr »

verdverm wrote: post #14

> GitHub PRs are Markdown documents, and some organizations have specific templates with checklists for all reviewers to complete. Enforcing these often requires ugly regexes that are a pain to write and worse to debug This is because GitHub is not building the features we need, instead they are putting their energy towards the AI land grab. Bitbucket, by contrast, has a feature where you can block PRs using a checkb…

> Bitbucket, by contrast, has a feature where you can block PRs using a checkbox list outside of the description box

I'm not sure this is better. I like the idea of the full context of the PR being available in a small set of relatively standardised fields. Smaller, non-semantic sets are easier to standardise.

Re: Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

#50

Post by iansinnott »

bradgessler wrote: post #22
verdverm wrote: post #14

> GitHub PRs are Markdown documents, and some organizations have specific templates with checklists for all reviewers to complete. Enforcing these often requires ugly regexes that are a pain to write and worse to debug This is because GitHub is not building the features we need, instead they are putting their energy towards the AI land grab. Bitbucket, by contrast, has a feature where you can block PRs using a checkb…

Not only is GitHub focused on AI, but they’re also making their UI slower and jankier by rewriting it in React. I feel like a “Linear for GitHub” is due.

Linear itself has a workflow for Github: https://linear.app/docs/github
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