Huh, I haven’t thought of markdown as modal editing before. I guess in a way it is, but it isn’t as modal as a tool like Vi for example. In markdown you keep typing the formatting as you go, the only mode is looking at the preview.
Markdown modality isn’t a big deal if a Markdown editor does syntax highlighting. DevonThink doesn’t.
After some experimentation I discovered that one CAN add handwritten notes and active links in iAWriter. I was able to write a test note in Apple Notes and then copy/paste it into an iAWriter note. I was also able to create an Google Doc sharing link as an active link in iAWriter, which opens the PDF in Google Drive. I was able to do the same thing with a link to an Apple Note. I was also able to export the iAWriter note to Word and the link was preserved as well as the handwritten note image. This was easy to do but required a few extra steps. Adding an image of the handwritten note also adds extra files to iCloud under iAWriter.
See the attached screenshots.
What I need to decide is are these extra steps worthwhile in order to use plain text exclusively for my notes? As I see it, the advantage is that plain text is app agnostic and can easily be shared and opened in nearly any app. and of course markdown is available. Apple Notes on the other hand requires an export as a PDF or a tedious copy/paste of each note’s content to get the content out.
Any thoughts on this matter? Is going plain text exclusively worth the few extra steps (only required when I want to include handwritten notes from Apple Notes)?
Man, I’d love to but I know virtually nothing about automation. I’d love help on that!
Cool, this looks promising. I wonder if this content block feature would be better?
I guess you would drag in a copy of the file to the ia Writer library:
This looks very promising! Thanks for passing this along.
I have been using iA Writer all day and I’m liking it. It it working perfectly with my new approach of putting everything in iCloud rather than in DEVONThink. It took a while for me to figure iA Writer out but I’m getting it. The ability to create tables and add links with Markdown makes it fast and extremely flexible. My other work documents are in Google Drive so I simply copy the share link to my iA Writer document, same goes for Apple Note and Pages links.
Have you tried Org Mode in Emacs ? I have been playing with this for outlining. It is quite powerful, but does have a rather steep learning curve. It does plain text outlining beautifully and with Pandoc, export is easy.
yes I’m playing with it and it’s very powerful and flexible.
I think I will default on that for outlining for now, and continue to experiment with other modes to handle text.
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Use a folder to bundle both docs or use the same name with their different extensions. You could also create a naming convention (i.e., doc1 a.rtf doc1 b.pdf) with the presence of an “a” indicating that there is an other version present.
Good suggestion, thanks!
Check out Keyboard Maestro to automate. The basics aren’t bad to learn and there’s a super friendly and supportive forum.
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Huh, never thought about using github for this. I use github all the time for source code, but not my plain text notes. One thing to note is that iA Writer supports different versions of your files.
MacStories has a nice write up on how they use this to do collaborative writing and run the site:
Thanks, I already use Working Copy, github and Pythonista together on my iPad to write Python code. Never thought to use the same workflow for markdown text files. I’m still not convinced I need that kind of control with my personal notes files, but I’m glad that option exists for when the need might arise. I can see the benefits of this for a team editing the same file. Or perhaps if I was writing a much longer text document where I’d want to have control over the various drafts and published versions, but that’s not something I do very often.
Most of my notes are relatively short, a few paragraphs of information each. Do you put these type of notes in github? What advantage do you see for using github for this?
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I only use Git with writing to publish to my blog with Blot, simply because I prefer that route to the Dropbox option Blot also provides.
Otherwise I think the collaboration features are the key ones. I wouldn’t use it for keeping personal notes.
As I noted recently in the discussion on plain text vs. notes/writing apps, I settled on HTML in TextEdit as my preferred note format for my journal and personal hypertext system (which I also browse in DEVONthink), instead of RTF. It is functionally identically to RTF, providing rich-text features like multiple highlight colors and text colors etc. (but no inline images in TextEdit—I just link to images as sidecar files).
I consider HTML to be far superior to RTF when I want do batch search-and-replace across multiple files using regular expressions (which I typically do with BBEdit’s multi-file search, when necessary). Parsing HTML is super-easy (especially if you’ve been working with HTML most of your life, as I have) but parsing RTF is a horrific nightmare (in my opinion).
I wrote an AppleScript service that I invoke with a keyboard shortcut that creates a new HTML note and opens it for editing in TextEdit. I wrote an AppleScript droplet that I drop files onto when I want to create hyperlinks in my notes.
I’ve been happily working this way for about five years and I don’t anticipate changing. I use plain text for some purposes, but usually I want all the features that rich text provides (but with the underlying clarity of HTML, not the forbidding mess of RTF—just my opinion of course).
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Why did you choose HTML over Markdown? The thing I like about markdown is that it is relatively unobtrusive as a markup language. HTML has the opening and closing tags and is just uglier to look at than markdown. It definitely has more capability than markdown, but most of the time it is not needed, at least for my personal notes.
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For me the choice wasn’t between HTML and Markdown; it was between WYSIWYG rich text, with features such as multiple highlight colors and text colors, and less fully-featured plain text with visible markup (e.g. Markdown).
I don’t write in HTML or think about HTML at all. The rich text is merely saved as HTML behind the curtain of WYSIWYG goodness. The only time I have to think about the markup is when I am doing batch search-and-replace across multiple files using regular expressions, which is rare.
I am not sure that I can articulate all the reasons why I wanted to take advantage of rich text—which has been built into macOS from the beginning and is almost certainly not going away. I make use of highlighting, just to mention one feature. (Highlighting is a key part of Tiago Forte’s progressive summarization method, which I don’t follow exactly, but my use of highlighting and other formatting is somewhat similar to that.)
If macOS strangely drops support for rich text, I can easily use Pandoc to convert my HTML files to some other format.
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I forgot to ask before: how do you deal with these files on iOS/iPadOS? If at all, of course.
OK, that makes sense. I agree HTML is a better option than RTF. What app do you use on iOS to edit your HTML files?