Refreshing the Markdown preview

DEVONthink Tips
1

Jim’s enthusiasm for Markdown is making me try it again.

I might be able to live without WYSIWYG as long as the version of a document in the Markdown preview pane in side-by-side view is refreshed immediately or almost immediately. But my preview is not getting refreshed at all unless I leave the document or the application or press control+command+y.

Is this the intended behavior or is there a problem?

(I searched help and the forum. Sorry if I missed the answer. Also looked for every preference setting that might help.)

2

Development would need to assess the overhead of displaying the changes as you type, but at the moment the document should autosave changes periodically. Also, you can press Command-S to explictly save the file and the preview should reflect the changes.
Cheers!

3

Cmd+S is great.
Was driving me nuts and I was clicking another document and coming back to the one I was editing to get the formatting right.

Thank you.

Wonder if an automatic save/version control is possible like with miro.com or google.com or descript.com or other web tools that just save after every action and keep an automatic change list by saving every user action and letting a user just go back to a prior version by looking at the history

4

I guess having all user actions saved on a stack is easy with something like Google docs. And I don’t know if they really make all interactions reversible.

Not so much with a scriptable environment like DT: A script coud, for example, do something like app.doShellScript('rm thisfile') (yes, a silly example) or change the name of a record. Reverting actions like this becomes a nightmare (or impossible in the case of the script).

5

I’m not sure how it is implemented.
But let’s take git for example.
When you save your source code (commit with a comment) that becomes a version you can return to.
So all of the tools above I mention just have git built in. No need to add a comment. They just save in chronological order. If you want to restore something from a few weeks ago, you just select it, preview it, and hit restore.

6

Git saves all changes between commits. So it depends on the user‘s behavior: if they commit after every single change, they can revert every single change. Otherwise, only a bunch of changes can be reverted. That’s not quite what you requested before.

Undo/redo behaves different from that as it works atomically: every change to the document can be reverted individually.

7

Well, I’m happy to have found the cmd+S
Saves me a bunch of time.
The comments above made it sound like saving every keystroke and giving a preview would be difficult.

So I’m always wondering how it can be done on the cloud so “easily” when you can have 100’s of people on the same document at the same time.

Take the three examples:

  • Miro lets multiple people draw on the same whiteboard
  • Descript lets multiple people edit the same transcript
  • Of course everybody knows Google sheets/docs/slides…

These products offer an activity panel and you can restore anything. After a period of time, the back-end system seems to group those changes (for descript). For miro, it seems they just keep everything. You can even restore stuff that is deleted, images, drawings, text, everything is restored independent of the version (important distinction). Furthermore, everything has those contextual computing concepts that David Sparks talks about - meaning each object has a URL so if it disappears, it’s still there, just like objects in DEVONthink. At least until they are deleted permanently from the database I suppose.

8

Maybe one of the differences (I don’t know these products, just a wild guess here) is that there one works with a single document. Whereas DT has methods to change a bunch of documents at once. And not only their contents but also a lot of metadata. To permit undo for that environment would mean making a copy of every document before it is modified in any way. And not only that, but also all (!) its metadata like name, location, tags etc.

I’m not sure that’s viable on a desktop, much less a mobile system.

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9

I’ve always wondered why I don’t have ide.cloud.google.com available for my google docs.

You may be right… If they let me do anything powerful with my files, they might have some heavy lifting to do on the back-end to keep things straight.

Thank you.

10

You might be interested to look at Downloading a PDF snapshot of a Google Doc - #27 by syntagm

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11

Fun script.

I think we got a bit off topic.

For example, if I want a Google doc as a PDF, I will just paste the links on miro.com and then tell miro to expand the doc/sheet/slide. It will lay out every page on the board and I can do what I want on them in terms of drawing or further edits.

I really like to avoid code. I like visual tools. For example, I prefer Keyboard Maestro’s designer more than AppleScript. I prefer MIT Scratch to writing Python.

It’s just so much easier to wire something up using a tool like NodeRed than it is to think about writing loops and low level coding ideas.

So I do try to avoid scripts.

Anyhow guys, I only responded to say thanks for the cmd+s so I can now type some markdown and see the result.

I don’t understand, just like the original poster doesn’t understand why the markdown tool isn’t WYSIWYG…

And the only reason I was looking at Markdown was because for some reason, when I paste a link like this into a text document…

x-devonthink://search?query=022017%20kind:video

for some reason DT3 would highlight it the first time and then when I reopen the text document, it is no longer highlighted until I hit space after it.

So I settled on doing this style of link in markdown, which works fine
x-devonthink://search?query=022017%20kind:video

The plain text document should highlight devonthink links automatically when opened. It doesn’t.

So I go into “find a workaround” mode. I found a workaround.
Markdown, but markdown doesn’t show me the edits as I add them to the document, so I have to work around that… and the workaround is a cmd + S.

Appreciate all the posts here on the forum. Without them. I’d probably never understand how the product works.

12

This is because of Smart Links - I have the exact same ‘problem’ and asked if this could be changed. It will be updated in the next release: Recognize links in Markdown WYSIWYG editor - #9 by mdbraber

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