i'd suggest an option to turn off all of these "features".
they strike me as being like the so-called "smart" stuff
in microsoft-word, which is always screwing stuff up...
i want my text-editor to let me do all the typing, thank you.
i don't want it "helping" me out making its own keystrokes.
-bowerbird
I don't know... I think wrapping and auto-pairing could save you hours in sarcastic quotation marks alone.
Then why would you be buying a Markdown editor in the first place? I assume just for preview or some kind of syntax highlighting. The thing with Markdown, though, is it's a relatively predictable syntax, and (e.g.) hitting return at the end of a list item and getting the indentation and list delimiter automatically doesn't hinder anything, especially if it's smart enough to end the list and delete the last delimiter when you press return again. Dozens of apps already do this. I'm mostly just suggesting refinements to existing behaviors.
We did make the decision to allow disabling the Markdown editing features of nvALT, mostly because it's not marketed as a Markdown-specific tool (it should be… I get emails daily from people who really should just be using NV). If I buy a "Markdown Editor," though, it had better have at least some of these features.
brett said:
Then why would you be buying
a Markdown editor in the first place?
for the preview pane?, because "marked"
doesn't work on snow leopard any more? ;+)
but seriously, that's a great question, and
i see my point needs some more nuance.
first of all, you've created a great list there,
and even though i did not take the time to
think through every one of the suggestions,
i can tell that you probably did, so i would
expect that all of them are well-specified...
and i love the fact that you floated this list
of well-thought-out suggestions publicly...
that kind of push for thoughtful interaction
is something i would like to see more of,
from people in general, so i applaud you.
i can't help but think that we humans are
squandering the communication potential
with which this century has blessed us...
and if we learn to do it with software design,
maybe we can leverage that to ending war,
and hunger, and poverty, and violence, and...
so please understand i admire your list, i do.
but here's the flip side of it. partly because
this list is so extensive, halfway through
i started getting the feeling that this editor
would be doing so many keystrokes for me
that it would start to make me a bit dizzy...
so if i started at zero, and jumped into all
of them, at once, i might feel i'd lost control.
but don't get me wrong. i can most definitely
see the appeal of the ones that i can grok...
indeed, when i first used multimedia composer,
and had created an unordered list, and hit the
"enter" key, and it inserted the asterisk for me
to start off the next line, i let out a little whistle.
whoa, i said, that's cool, and helpful, and neat.
and i imagine that every one of your features
might be like that -- or even would be --
if i could just introduce 'em more gradually into
my workflow, rather than get hit with all at once.
and heck, maybe i'm wrong, and i really could
handle all of 'em at once, i dunno. but it seemed
to me that the list of all of them was "too much",
that a robot had taken over the machine from me.
so i thought an option to turn any one or more of
them off would be a nice concession to the user.
do i think any of these should be eliminated?
no, i'm sure each one would find its supporters,
even if it's one that i might never enable myself.
but i can also say that i'd definitely want to have
an ability to disable each and every one of 'em...
-bowerbird
p.s. i hate the syntax highlighting in "composer"
for much the same reason. i don't need it, and
i find it to be a distraction when i'm writing/editing.
p.p.s. just so you know, in case you don't already,
i created my own form of light-markup, long before
markdown appeared, and i'm a programmer too, so
i'll be releasing my own editor-tool "real soon now".
but in the mode of coding to scratch my own itches,
my app will contain few of the features from your list.
so maybe i'm just jealous that you'll have more shiny.
nonetheless, once again, i admire the thought you did.
indeed, i'm a big fan of all you've done for light-markup.
⌘K could format the selection as a code span. If the selected text contained backticks, it could be wrapped with three or more backticks. If the selection started or ended with space characters, the command could wrap it with HTML code tags instead.
Some smart quote characters could be auto-paired. Smart quotes, single quotes, backticks, asterisks, and underscores could be paired when wrapping a selection.
URLs could be highlighted. The matching rules could consider Markdown syntax. Clicking for example [Firefly](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series\)) could remove the backslash-escape.
There could be commands for converting a selection from Markdown to HTML and HTML to Markdown. The HTML to Markdown output could avoid uncommon formatting styles like those used by html2text.
I think actions like renumbering lists and converting inline links to references should be provided by some external app or script. We need TextMate's Select Bundle Item for all text views... Even if someone only wrote in Markdown, they'd occasionally need to encode XML entities or sort the selected lines.
The same sort of applies to most text editing shortcuts. Actually I'd be much more interested in a replacement for DefaultKeyBinding.dict than yet another app like MultiMarkdown Composer or Mou or Byword...
Since I do technical writing, I would love a markdown editor that has better support for math, code blocks, and citations (I use pandoc-style markdown, but these are supported in MMD, too). Specifically, it would be great if the editor was aware if I were in a math or code environment, and change auto-pairing and display behavior to match. Textmate with the pandoc Textmate bundle has some useful features (such as citation auto-complete). I usually write in nvALT and switch to Textmate.
While this isn't so much about the actual writing part, combining the ease of search and file navigation of nvALT and then seamlessly getting into an environment more like Byword would be nice. I use the two apps in tandem at the moment, but they've always felt like two parts of the same whole.
As for the actual writing, the option to get reference links by number rather than name when inserting from the clipboard or converting them from inline would be nice (especially for those who use an editor). And being able to create a list of inline links from open browser tabs would be helpful (especially when doing things like show notes for a podcast). I use your Tablinks to pull the title and urls, but native functionality would be great.
I wish you liked Emacs more so you would implement this all in Emacs.
But the real question is: can'tYou get Vim to do this somehow? Missing time right?
Sure I could. I already have almost all of it working in TextMate and half of it working in System Services. However, when it comes to writing (as opposed to coding), I don't love Vim, and I prefer Byword over TextMate. I'd prefer all of this to happen in a Cocoa text system, too.
I'd love to see it all seamlessly combined into a writing app that removed all the friction. Most of this should happen without the user having to think about it, things just work and actions are all intuitive.
Remarkbox