Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

p.migdal.pl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 282 posts

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

#81

Post by david422 »

pphysch wrote: post #65
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.

When writing in text mode so that you can see what you are generating. Wouldn't really need it the other direction though.

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

#82

Post by zackham »

I've used or built more personal knowledge/task/project management tools than I care to list over the years, and adopted various methods along the way. I've ended up in a place where I know what I need day to day: A place to dump my ideas, plans, reflections, and tasks, along with methods of processing and accessing all this data. It's hard to compete with plain text files, a notebook, and structured daily/weekly rituals that process these notes into actionable tasks, meeting agendas, and project docs. It's not that time consuming, it's super effective, and most importantly, it's infinitely and freely customizable because instead of software, you just have checklists and processes to manually follow. You can execute GTD without touching a computer: https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Wee...

I can get by just fine with that system, but a handful of months back I started wanting software again. Reminders, task wrangling, workflows around taking meeting notes, taking and processing transcripts of talking through ideas, automated daily and weekly checkins with summaries, project work logs, managing lists of things to talk about with people, the list goes on....

Same reasons I have always reached for software, and the same reasons I wrote my own system a few times over. But this time I had some new thoughts:

- I want this to have a chance at being my last system. For that, I must be able to read/edit the data without special software. I settled on committing to building software that interfaces with folders of Markdown files exclusively. I could use Obsidian to cover any gaps and get work done immediately–I don't need my software to do it all right away.

- I want to own as much of my recorded activity/thoughts as possible, so I can drop it into new AI models, giving them a ton of context about me and what I'm up to, and avoid getting vendor locked to OpenAI.

- I want ubiquitous access to the system, which means it's gotta be easily used from a phone.

7k LOC later and I've got a Telegram bot with a plugin architecture and a pile of plugins that implement everything I've described and more. The plugin arch means there's a defined interface and every new piece of functionality never ends up with more than 1k LOC in a file. My objective was to structure the project specifically so I could avoid the pitfalls of AI generated code as projects get large. Everything isolated with well defined integration points.

I chose Telegram because they have a great API, supporting custom keyboards for quick actions, audio input for taking voice memos that my system transcribes, and reaching out to me with reminders/requests on whatever device I'm on.

The result is thousands of messages that have translated into a nicely organized Obsidian vault. Couldn't be happier and think there's a chance I'll live with this thing for the foreseeable future–and I can always swap out the interface away from Telegram, build a proper frontend, or drop it altogether and be left with my Markdown files.

If anyone is interested I'd be happy to share what I've got. Just my private project that I'm reaping a lot of benefit from.

Here's a quick dump of some of my plugin commands to get a flavor of what I'm talking about: https://gist.github.com/zackham/3c2d061e6dd0127958c913329aa0...

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

#83

Post by profsummergig »

Windows here.

I use VSCode for markdown.

Obsidian's been coming up on the radar often.

This post finally made me try it out.

I like it a lot.

But there's one reason I won't be using it as my main driver for markdown files: I can't open files that are not in a vault. I have markdown files everywhere on my drive. And I don't want to make the entire drive a vault (for various reasons).

Obsidian configurable as...

1) my default file handler for markdown files

2) capable of opening and saving markdown files in any location on my PC

...would be sweet. (From my research, it can't do these currently.)

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

#84

Post by dangus »

hakaneskici wrote: post #78
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…

Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.

I'm not the parent commenter but I'm going to guess because HTML is horrible at WYSIWYG.

If your editing tool changes or if your switch editors, they will all botch your HTML anywhere you make edits.

RTF is basically "it just works," very much like "Microsoft Word Light."

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

#85

Post by packetlost »

philips wrote: post #80
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.

Someone is sort of building this on Obsidian: https://screen.garden

yoooo this is sweet. Been looking for this for awhile.

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

#86

Post by hakaneskici »

dangus wrote: post #84
hakaneskici wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.

I'm not the parent commenter but I'm going to guess because HTML is horrible at WYSIWYG. If your editing tool changes or if your switch editors, they will all botch your HTML anywhere you make edits. RTF is basically "it just works," very much like "Microsoft Word Light."

Makes sense. I was thinking that browsers have native support for WYSIWYG editing and most browsers/apps are Chromium based; so how the browser handles HTML formatting should be stable for a single person scenario even across apps.

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

#88

Post by copperx »

nicoburns wrote: post #76
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…

HTML is also worth considering. It's not quite as nice to write in as Markdown, but it's still pretty reasonable to hand write (or even read if it comes to it).

Is this sarcasm? or are we coming back full circle unintentionally?

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

#89

Post by e2021 »

0x073 wrote: post #74
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…

* Embedded images

markdown can do embedded images with data urls. It works really well, the data gets all appended at the end of the document

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

#90

Post by assimpleaspossi »

dangus wrote: post #84
hakaneskici wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.

I'm not the parent commenter but I'm going to guess because HTML is horrible at WYSIWYG. If your editing tool changes or if your switch editors, they will all botch your HTML anywhere you make edits. RTF is basically "it just works," very much like "Microsoft Word Light."

Your complaint seems to be about the editors, not HTML.
Post reply on HN