Feature requests: More markdown supports

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I feel it’s not convenient to work with Markdown in DevonThink. I would like to suggest the following to improve the experiences.

  1. Menu button for New Markdown. Could we add a custom button to create markdown directly? Just like what’s for RTF.

  2. Allow custom style. Visual appearing affects productivity directly but current markdown rendering can’t be claimed as nice. I know there is a workaround to add custom styles like blog.devontechnologies.com/2016/ … ent-657246. But I’m not a fan of messing styling with content, seeing those files are also opened, exported for other external applications. It would be great if we have a way to set such in preferences.

  3. Altering double clicking behavior. Current it’s to open in internal DevonThink viewer. I wonder if it’s possible to allow us to have an option to open it by default OS app for such type, so that I can edit it in my favorite editor(I’m a Vim user thus I prefer to work under some app with vim mode but wonder if requesting to add such vim keybinding support will be too aggressive to DevonThink).

Thanks for consideration!

2

Thanks for the opinions and suggestions. The double-click behavior is not liekly to be modified. This has been discussed at length in these forums and we have provided a hotkey / menu item / toolbar button for opening a file in the external application. Cheers!

3

Thanks checking Jim.

I was not aware of double clicking discussion, looks fine even without it.

Any ideas on #1 and #2? Are these something considerable?

4

Considerable, but I can’t promise anything. We definitely have noted it though. Cheers!

5

To be considered is very nice Jim. Thank you!

6

You can link to any stylesheet you want. For example, I use the “AIR” css package. I add this tag to my markdown documents, whether edited in DEVONthink or elsewhere:


<link rel="stylesheet" href="file:///Users/Me/Sites/CSS Styles/AIR/css/air.css">

It’s easy to write a TextEditor or Typinator or KeyboardMaestro macro to insert this in a new markdown file, or create your own markdown template in DEVONthink. You’ll get a lot more flexibility if you use this method than if DEVONtech makes decisions about styling that you might not like.

7

I use Marked (http://marked2app.com) as a viewer, while I am in edit mode in Devonthink. Edits are instantly viewable and you can use predefined style sheets as well as your own. I do all exporting from Marked.

8

@vectorchem: Good call. Brett is a great guy (and very talented too). We’re glad you’re supporting him too.

9

this should be made a prefeence for md, rtf and pdf. please let the user set his/her own preference…

10

As i said, it has been discussed at length and the current behavior is due to the majority of Users’ opinions on the matter. I didn’t say “never”, but I still say “it’s unlikely” to change.

PS: If you search these Forums you will see a lot of pressure to “just add a preference”. We have so many preferences that some of them are even hidden! :mrgreen: Our preference panes are already overloaded. Adding more is not always the answer.

11

… like the default view of md-text … i’ve came across that one in the forums and now DTPO behaves like DTG with md-text … really nice to have this as a hidden pref … thank you

so is there a hidden preference then for the double-click behavior on rtf/md/pdf-docs?

12

All hidden preferences can be found in Help > DEVONthink Help > Documentation > Appendix > Hidden Preferences

13

@korm, thanks much for the tip of hidden preferences. Especially I found the “PlainTextIsMarkdown” one quite interesting. I’m considering if I need to enable this as all the files I handled are markdown. :smiley:

For the styling, it’s a different story. I have Marked 2 bought long time ago, used along with VIM. And currently I used Haroopad more together with Devonthink which is more straightforward. Styling when editing is not a concern at all. The point is more time spent on Devonthink is to searching, using and reviewing information which is a read mode and a better built-in display would be much more helpful.

I know inline styling but it’s not an option for me. None is actually better. The time when I editing or exporting these files I don’t want to mess content with styling. Also when one day you are tired with one theme, global changing is not easy with inline ones.

14

I would really appreciate a little bit more support for markdown. I use DTP since years now and got over the times different databases. I see there are coming some similar Tools with a lot more useability and customization. I know we are speaking just from a database, but a cooler style or possible customized layout would be a bit step in the right direction …

thanks Victor

15

yes, I think the sytle support for markdown is really very useful feature. I support this request. Korm’s work around helps a lot. I am using it for now. But, a native support of the style would make the markdown editing in Devonthink more solid.