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If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

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Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#61

Post by caseyy »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…

Markdown editors like Typora somewhat close this gap in functionality.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#62

Post by renewiltord »

jon_richards wrote: post #36

The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.

You can do that in IntelliJ. If there's a way to control a tab on a browser you could do that too. When I was writing my thesis, I would have `inotifywait` running on one side and when it detected the file had changed it would run the entire `pdflatex` + `bibtex` pipeline the 6 times or whatever it needed and Evince would hot-reload so I had a live preview. I'm sure a browser can do the same with some command.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#63

Post by kstrauser »

croes wrote: post #56

Why not Asciidoc instead of Markdown?

AsciiDoc's fine. So is reStructuredText. In some ways they're both a lot better than Markdown, even though I think MD's surely easier to learn and use. But the one clear advantage MD has over the others is its ubiquity. If a tool works with formatted text, it almost certainly supports MD. It might also support the others, but if so, that's just a bonus.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#64

Post by lincpa »

kreelman wrote: post #53

Hmmm. I see the use in this... For me, everything swirls in an enjoyable vortex towards org-mode. - Literate Programming, tangle/weave - Export to DocX, PDF, HTML - Org-Roam - Time Management. Several things mentioned above are day to day. I think spectacular things are often made up of collections of useful everyday things.

[dead]

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#65

Post by pphysch »

jon_richards wrote: post #36

The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.

Why does it need to be side by side? Just let each client choose WSIWYG or raw.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#66

Post by t_mann »

hakaneskici wrote: post #58
t_mann wrote: post #48

Can relate to that sentiment. What I'm still looking for is a simple solution that lets me use simple local files (eg plaintext/markdown; csv or single-page HTML would also be fine) as a backend for a web app (with login, obviously). Basically, I want to have something like a todo.txt that lives on my machine (in the folder that syncs to my cloud storage) but that I can also edit when I'm on my phone. Like using Goog…

Why not have AI build this for you? :) With the AI coding tools getting better each day, I'm starting to think why I would spend any time researching what's out there for what I want, instead of just using an AI coding agent to put something together in 10 mins, and forget about it. It's getting easier and faster to have AI build something that solves my exact problem. Maybe not perfect, but OK.

I'm sure it'd be super quick to build it with the help of an LLM once I know what setup I want. I actually used ChatGPT once for ideation, I'd need look it up again, but what I remember none of the proposed solutions were convincing.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#67

Post by gerdesj »

Mediawiki. Let's balance durability against functionality.

MW gets you a massively scalable doc store that does not need much room. Most MW instances are MySQL/MariaDB backed and the schema etc is very well described.

Keep it plain text for "notes" but a MW will be easily discoverable for quite some time from now.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#68

Post by tpmoney »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #34

When it comes to text (though I do include Word, PDF, text files, markdown, tex) I like to burn them to dvd. I have one of those big dvd "catalogs" that takes 4 discs per side of a page. Keep one at home and one at my parents' place. I trust them more than usb-sticks. Though that may be irrational. But the time for burning files to dvd seems almost over. It is hard /impossible to buy a computer with a dvd drive. That…

The trick with burning optical media is the disks themselves can physically fail with time. I have a huge archive of various burned media from the early 00's and a number of them have developed literal holes in the material over the years. If these holes hit data tracks, the files on those tracks are lost. If you're burning to optical media, you should probably be checking them regularly for degradation.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#70

Post by darkteflon »

Onawa wrote: post #27
asielen wrote: post #23

100% agree. I've been using markdown for a few years after moving away from proprietary note taking apps. Although this has led to me developing my own short hand for many things in my notes. And have been looking at a way to integrate a to-do list with my notes with some Python scripts. So while my notes may rely on some personal scripts to get there most value out of them, I strongly value that they are still plain…

Maybe consider Quarto? Free and open source, integrates Python scripting directly in Markdown and/or able to call from separate scripts.

Love Quarto. I write all my notes, presentations, blog posts, memos, etc in .qmd files. For non-technical stuff I use Obsidian to author (there is an extension which tells Obsidian to treat .qmd as ordinary markdown - ie ignoring the additional Quarto frontmatter and so on), then for everything else I use VS Code with the Quarto extension and just render out to the display format I need. I really appreciate that it’s built on Pandoc and it means I can just use one format and one set of tooling for everything.
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