May 09
2012

While there was some excitement and hearty agreement with the list of my ideal Markdown text editor features, there was also some criticism. There were some valid points in all of the critiques, and I’d like to address them. I’ll do so by rambling a bit.

First, I think that some critics felt the list was overwhelming, and didn’t really dive in and consider the ramifications (or lack) of the features mentioned. I think the length and detail of the text was misleading when skimmed. The feature set is not as intrusive as it looks at first glance.

There was also a healthy portion of “Markdown is plain text, I want to edit it as plain text.” And that’s fine. If you don’t need anything more than TextEdit or your favorite code editor, then a Markdown editor isn’t really your market anyway. The list–and any debate surrounding it–is for people who use Markdown-specific editors and want to expand on them.

There’s room for those who fall in between, of course, and I understand that anything that makes Markdown editing into a word processor is counterproductive. Markdown is also, however, about convenience. Increasing productivity while writing is my goal, not adding buttons, bloat or new markup features.

My initial list was formulated over several years, but written in about 20 minutes. It was loosely organized and quickly typed. I’ll attempt here to sort things a little better as I expound on my requests. This probably won’t be brief. Apologies in advance¹.

Continue reading “Regarding my dream Markdown editor…”

May 08
2012

This is another of my attempts at keeping track of my day in an orderly fashion. It’s a pretty simple idea. Given that most of of what I do is stored in git repositories, my commit logs are my best bet for seeing what I’ve accomplished each day. I just needed to pull them together and bundle them up without having to think about it. If a lot of your work happens in git repositories and you make frequent commits, this might be of use to you.

This script runs nightly and visits a list of local git repositories to extract a log of any commits for the day. It formats them as Markdown and can log them to Day One or just to a plain text file (single file, appended). There’s an accompanying shell command for easily adding the current directory as a repo to check.

This is what my log looks like in nvALT (with a custom theme):

GitLogger log in nvALT

Git notes are included, as is body text of the commit if it exists. Formatting creates an unordered list, and short hashes for the commits are added at the end of the commit message, just in case you need them.

As usual, if you’re interested in trying it, I’m happy to share…

Continue reading “Scatterbrains: git as biographer…”

May 06
2012

There are a few great Markdown text editors available, and more being worked on right now. I want to put a list of features out there that I think any true Markdown editor should include. Some of these are implemented in one editor or another, but nothing has brought it all together (aside from TextMate with all of my customizations, and even that lacks some of the polish mentioned below).

Continue reading “My ultimate Markdown editor wishlist…”