I'm moving towards a more compact setup of software for my writing, borrowing several concepts and tips from people in this forum, as well as the Cyborganize process. My main goal is to maintain disturbance-free, focus facilitating environments for writing (WriteMonkey, Resophnotes) and editing texts (Brainstorm, Sense), as well as flexible repositories for organising the end products of various such procedures (ConnectedText, Dokuwiki)

Within this context, plain text is a powerful ally, with its ability to work as a universal format for exchanging texts among my applications, as pointed out in the past http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/10506

However, plain text is, well plain, which is not ideal when one is not writing continuous texts as in fiction, but rather more technical documents with bullets, emphasis and links. Of course, one could use HTML, but then s/he would be programming, not writing.

Markdown to the rescue; this interesting "un-markup" language http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ combines the best of two worlds by allowing texts to be marked in an intuitive and human-readable manner, which can directly convert to HTML. As an example, the following Markdown will produce a level-3 heading, a title in bold and a bulleted list. How much simpler can it get?

### ESSENTIAL SOFTWARE ###

__Office__

* Brainstorm
* Resophnotes + Simplenotes sync |
* TextPad
* WriteMonkey

I was positively surprised by the support to Markdown: from the software mentioned earlier, ResophNotes, WriteMonkey and Dokuwiki will all understand Markdown (the latter with the help of a plugin). The ones that don't will not be bothered by it, so I can use it anyway.

Now if it were only supported as an alternative markup in ConnectedText...

Nicely done, Alex.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I was positively surprised by the support to Markdown: from the software
mentioned earlier, ResophNotes, WriteMonkey and Dokuwiki will all
understand Markdown (the latter with the help of a plugin). The ones
that don't will not be bothered by it, so I can use it anyway.

Is there actually a hierarchical outliner out there for Windows (or online) that can convert Markdown into an outline based on the headings? I'm writing my text in Markdown in Gingko, but it would be good if I could paste the Markdown text (or its HTML version) into an outliner and the headings would be recognised and the text could be rearranged accordingly.

I could probably export the Markdown from Gingko as HTML, paste into Word, save as RTF, then import into Outline 4D, and do the rearranging there, but that's just too many steps (though I could do that at the end with the complete text).

At the moment I just wanted a quick visualisation of the overall structure of the developing text, and then maybe promote or demote certain sections and adjust my original accordingly in Gingko.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I'm moving towards a more compact setup of software for my writing,
borrowing several concepts and tips from people in this forum, as well
as the Cyborganize process. My main goal is to maintain
disturbance-free, focus facilitating environments for writing
(WriteMonkey, Resophnotes) and editing texts (Brainstorm, Sense), as
well as flexible repositories for organising the end products of various
such procedures (ConnectedText, Dokuwiki)

Alexander,

If you're still reading this, how did you get on with Cyborganize? I'm also curious what sort of workflow and toolchain you ended up with.

I have recently stumbled upon Cyborganize again and decided to review it more closely, as it does seem to contain some interesting ideas, though I'm not sure I'd want to use the same tools as suggested by Joseph.

What set me off was that I decided to reinstall Brainstorm and compare it with WorkFlowy, to see if there is anything I'm missing from not using Brainstorm.

I never got the hang of Brainstorm, but I'm intrigued by the fact that it forces you to focus on a single hierarchical level of detail, rather than on the outline itself. I'm just wondering if that is a specific type of cognitive operation that might be useful to cultivate (within Cyborganize or otherwise).

There are some good links to various Markdown resources in this article:

"Online Markdown Converter For Open Educational Resources"

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/omcoer/64822

Dr Andus wrote:

There are some good links to various Markdown resources in this article:

Dr Andus, thanks for the heads up on the resources, and also for bringing my attention to this (much) older post of mine. I'll report back soon.

My fave markdown editor was not mentioned in links, most useful alongside bonsai natara. There are a couple of other emerging formats similar to markdown, but I still like markdown best, however they might evolve to take over.

washere wrote:

My fave markdown editor was not mentioned in links, most useful
alongside bonsai natara.

And what is it?

Franz Grieser wrote:

washere wrote:
>My fave markdown editor was not mentioned in links, most useful
>alongside bonsai natara.

And what is it?

https://typora.io/

Dr Andus wrote:

There are some good links to various Markdown resources in this article:

"Online Markdown Converter For Open Educational Resources"

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/omcoer/64822

The article doesn't mention Markdown's major deficiency. There is no Markdown standard and implementers have developed lots of variants that are incompatible with each other. So interoperability is largely a crapshoot.

We got a start a few years ago on developing a Markdown standard via W3C to cut through this interop Gordion's Knot, but couldn't persuade a single implementer to participate.

That was largely a replay of an earlier effort to standardize wiki syntax. Implementers just don't care enough about interoperability to invest the effort required to develop and implement a standard.

Because of user requests, we recently implemented Markdown export in NoteCase Pro, with options to handle up to four varying parameters. But for my personal use, I am boycotting Markdown because of implementers' refusal to collaborate on developing and implementing a standard aimed at interoperability of implementations. It's pure vendor lock-in B.S. mixed with a dash of developer laziness.

Ha, yes, Typora - I entirely agree with you; what a superb Markdown editor it is!

It's just a bit tragic that there isn't an iOS version, but it's vastly superior to almost everything else for sheer stunning elegance if nothing else. For those who don't know, Typora uses MultiMarkdown (i.e. tables, tasks, etc.), but the hybrid preview you'll be familiar with from e.g. Bear, Ulysses etc. is in fact a full preview. Only when you start editing a header or sentence does it either show the markdown code or, e.g. in the case of tables, a very clever embedded menu that offers you additional formatting options.

The only downside? It's very much a single-file app, so no library etc. If you want a similar app that also has a more sophisticated hybrid preview (not unlike Typora), take a look at TextNut.

Thanks for the hint to Typora. I like the looks, will give it a try. Though I just bought a license for Write (www.writeapp.co), another Markdown editor.

Sure there is. View > Toggle Sidebar > Articles is used to view and manage the contents of a watched folder.

MadaboutDana wrote:

The only downside? [Typora is] very much a single-file app, so no library etc.
If you want a similar app that also has a more sophisticated hybrid
preview (not unlike Typora), take a look at TextNut.

A cautionary note about Typora: It renders your text so beautifully that you'll be disgusted with the way your writing looks in Bear or most any other editor.

Okay, I'm kidding, but only just barely. Text looks great in Typora.

Steve Z.

And...there's a Windows version. Good to see a developer with common sense.

Hi Paul - sorry, yes, you're quite right (and in fact that left-hand navigation bar also allows you to view all kinds of stuff, such as the in-file outline, files either as list or with tags and previews, etc.), which does indeed amount to a kind of "library". BUT - and for me it's a big but - it doesn't include a cross-file search function. So in my view, not really a library as such (although it is a superb file manager).

But if universal search isn't an issue, then yes, this file management feature makes Typora even more attractive.

Has performance improved at all? I tried it years ago and while it was *very* attractive, I found it unusable because of severe input lag. It would take almost a full second from the time I hit a key until the character was displayed on screen. I'd test it myself, but my PC is under a heavy load at the moment and will be for another day.

It should run fine once I finish with the task at hand since I now have a six-core multi-threaded processor, but that kind of power shouldn't be necessary just to run a text editor.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Ha, yes, Typora - I entirely agree with you; what a superb Markdown
editor it is!

It's just a bit tragic that there isn't an iOS version, but it's vastly
superior to almost everything else for sheer stunning elegance if
nothing else. For those who don't know, Typora uses MultiMarkdown (i.e.
tables, tasks, etc.), but the hybrid preview you'll be familiar with
from e.g. Bear, Ulysses etc. is in fact a full preview. Only when you
start editing a header or sentence does it either show the markdown code
or, e.g. in the case of tables, a very clever embedded menu that offers
you additional formatting options.

The only downside? It's very much a single-file app, so no library etc.
If you want a similar app that also has a more sophisticated hybrid
preview (not unlike Typora), take a look at TextNut.

No longer an issue, honest.

Marbux wrote:

There is no
Markdown standard and implementers have developed lots of variants that
are incompatible with each other. So interoperability is largely a
crapshoot.

There's CommonMark

In practice, I haven't found the variants to be a problem. I use two different variants for two different things: Jekyll for blog posts, MultiMarkdown for 'most everything else. I export plain Markdown from Tines, and all the variants work with it.