I've been thinking about extending my text editor to be able to handle markdown and simple links for a while. The final aim being able to maintain a local wiki and publish it easily. It looks like this project is similar to what I had in mind. A locally managed markdown folder. I'm looking forward to trying it: https://obsidian.md/

I hope you'll write a review. 🙂

I’ve had Obsidian sitting on my computer but haven’t made content yet with it!

Obsedian sounds like I could use.. gonna try it out right now! Thanks😀

I'm also interested in anyone's experience with this or similar software. I am a long time "by hand notebook" person

personally I’ve prioritized a workflow / philosophy over a tool

I use Bear (https://bear.app) for this… but I’m switching to Linux soon and will lose it 😞 One of the few pieces of software I’ll genuinely miss from macOS.

It's surprisingly easy to manage a wiki just as a folder full of Markdown files in just about any scriptable text editor. The only commands you really need are: 1. Make a link: take the selected text, make a new file with that as a name, then replace the select text with the link. E.g.,

[selected text](selected-text.md)

. 2. A way to open the link, most text editors can do this out of the box. I've been managing all my notes this way for years now and I love it. Having everything in

git

is great.

There is also https://www.zettlr.com/ Haven't tried it (and won't) but it's sitting in my bookmarks for a while.

@Jack Rusher By way of review, I did play with Obsidian for a bit. I liked the simplicity, and thought it was well put together. The link map is cute, though I'm not sure I would use it for anything useful - perhaps it would help find related things if I had a very big database. I imported my personal vimwiki into it, and it went without a hitch. The splitting works well, and you can customize all the hotkeys. There are lots of settings, but they get out of the way and the interface is pretty clean. The only real problem I have with it is that I can't use Vim keystrokes to edit the text. But in general it seems like a really nice tool for building a markdown database.

@Chris Maughan As someone with a significant investment in his editor, I understand. Using a tool that fights my muscle memory is not very compelling. Thanks for the capsule review!

My trouble is I want it all: • A markdown database I can trivially edit in Vim. • A single command deploy of my database to a website for browsing • The ability to make a slide presentation as a markdown file (Obsidian does this, though I haven't got around to trying it yet) • The ability to live-code at any point in the text and see the output inline with controls for users to play with (Jupyter, etc.) That last part is the hard part, obviously. Your link this morning showing off the Dynamic notebook had me excited for sure.... When this is done well, it is great: https://thebookofshaders.com/02/

@Chris Maughan This is a similar set of requirements to what I was looking for which makes me wonder whether you've considered the "role your own with an existing text editor" approach I mentioned above? I suspect you have, and are really just looking for something that has those features built-in, but I'd be curious to hear your reasons explicitly. Here's how I solve your requirements (so far, with gaps that illustrate the issues with this approach, but I'm playing the long game...): - This is of course solved, the whole approach is based on this. Text files not a db though, which in my opinion is better. - I haven't built this yet, except in my head, but the idea is just to make a script that either deploys via GitHub Pages, or a simply static site using Pug JS's built-in Markdown support. - There are a few solutions for doing this. I use Deckset (https://www.deckset.com/) (Mac only). - For the last one, I used to be really excited about this, but I've drifted from it for various reasons that aren't really important (mainly just it seems like anything I'd use this for, I can probably do faster in Excel). If I were trying to do this today though, I'd use VS Code, which has some interesting looking notebook support, although I've never tried it. For the record, one of the main goals for my app Repla (https://repla.app/plugins/live-coding/) is to do this type of thing in a text editor agnostic way. But like I've said I've drifted a bit from the idea.

Hi @robenkleene, sorry I missed your post. If you see my current #C0120A3L30R post, I'm working on doing most of this stuff in my own editor; that's one end goal for me. I intend for my editor (https://github.com/Rezonality/zep) to handle the Markdown editing/linking/jumping stuff. I think that's an easier task. I imagined that for the web deploy I would have a CSS file and some off the shelf markdown convertor. Something basic at first - and yes, to github pages. I got around to trying Obsidian's slide support; it is nicely done and so simple. I don't see why I couldn't do something similar.

Watched 2 minute video looks amazing. TextMate also has that feature where Markdown headers appear at a different sizes. I'm shocked that hasn't been copied more often. (Another cool Markdown feature TextMate has is supporting hanging punctuation.)

The follow-up feature of actually hiding the markdown hints is probably the harder thing to implement. But simple font changing seems like it must be easy to do.