I’d appreciate the ability to constrain text width in the Markdown editor.
This is partly because a regular width is better for readability, rather than having the text sprawl to fit the window size, which is always changing - not just because the app window is regularly changing, but because opening and closing the Inspector changes the editor/preview window size.
In Markdown preview mode, this isn’t an issue because my CSS keeps the text constrained to a pleasant reading width.
But when I’m in the editor, the Inspector pane either squashes up the plain text when opened, or when closed the text runs too wide for comfortable reading. Because of the Inspector’s behaviour, the optimal window state in preview mode is never an optimal window state in the editor.
Being able to constrain the editor text width to a number of characters would fix this.
As a workaround, one thing that might help with this issue is to use the “Side-by-side” display. This splits the view vertically into half, and the half-width for editing is thus narrower and more readable. (Well, I suppose that depends also on how wide your overall window is to begin with. I tend to not make my windows the size of the full screen.)
There is a drawback to split view, which is that it is more distracting, at least for me. I’ve had to train myself to ignore the preview panel when trying to concentrate on writing, but in times of lowered cognitive capacity, that doesn’t work, and then I just give up and use only the edit view. It was just such a situation yesterday that made me think “I wish DEVONthink had a setting for the column width in edit mode” and this morning I found this request for the same feature
Of course, one could open the document in another editor, but sometimes it’s convenient to be able to write notes quickly in DEVONthink.
I use Split View all the time, but I also don’t work in overly large windows. I’m often on an M1 Air so I’m usually working in halfscreen document windows.
I have used side-by-side display, but it feels like overkill for small notes, many of which don’t need much or anything in the way of formatting. For longer docs I use iA Writer, but I’m mostly dealing with small chunks of text.
I would also like to +1 this request. And I’d love the option for a bit airier line spacing.
@amcawood, there is some previous discussion about this here. A number of us are currently opening Markdown documents stored in DT and DTTG externally in iA Writer to achieve the more aesthetically satisfying editing experience you’re asking for. Although this adds some workflow complexity and maybe risk.
In the thread I linked to, I think there was some discussion of glitches on iPad when working in split view, causing text in DTTG to be lost when trying to open it in iA Writer, for example. Maybe that’s now been fixed, I’m not sure. For me, in macOS opening md files from DT to iA Writer has worked flawlessly, they always get saved properly back in DT. On iOS it’s a little less clear to me how/when iA Writer saves the files back into DTTG so it makes me a little nervous, even though so far I haven’t had a problem. Ideally, I’d feel more comfortable having a nicer-looking edit view in DTTG so I can just stay there.
