Color choices and/or highlighting would be a nice text addition. Thanks for creating Agenda and the simple, clean manner in which outline notations can be created and managed.
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I’m just trying out Agenda.app (version 5.5, on macOS) for the first time and have been quite impressed so far. However, the apparent inability to assign an arbitrary color to text is disappointing (to be clear, not just change system-wide or app-wide accent color), and it looks like others have voiced this as well.
Has there been any consideration to implementing arbitrary color choice at some point, or is it a fixed design decision not to permit this?
On a related note, if I understood correctly from the the roadmap thread, there are plans at some point to allow both arbitrary fonts and font size (not just increase/decrease the size of all text, à la a web browser). If this is so, might color choosing be a part of this plan – i.e. in a future release it will be able to arbitrarily assign font, size, and color to text?
PS: I’d like to second an earlier post that Papers (especially Papers v2) was an amazing piece of software!
Yes and no, we do indeed want to allow you to color/highlight the text, as well as offer more control over fonts etc. Having said that, this will probably rather be in the form of themes rather than complete arbitrary control over color and font etc. Only in second instance the natural next step would be to allow custom theme creation in which you could go completely crazy if you wish 
Just to set expectations though, we have a number of items on our list that we consider higher priority so it won’t be today or tomorrow. We’ll get there though. Hope that answers the question.
Thanks for the rapid response, and for setting (not unreasonable) expectations about time. However, for what it’s worth, for me at least (and I suspect many others), it would be extremely useful to be able to set arbitrary control over various parameters of text, perhaps most especially color. For example, in many (most?) macOS apps (e.g. (but not at all exclusively) Apple’s TextEdit or Notes) I can enter text, select it, invoke the system color picker (using the appropriate command in the Format menu or hitting command-shift-c), and apply whatever color I wish. Personally, I often use red for text that I regard as very important, and a few other colors for various other indications.
Is there any chance you might reconsider implementing rich text (or at least something very close to it, instead of just accents) for a future release of Agenda at some point? I understand that rich text might conflict with markdown export to some extent. For many users however the ability to enter/manipulate rich text is more useful than markdown export. On a related note, rich text is relatively simple and broadly supported, so itself is quite portable if/when desired. What’s more, those specifically interested in markdown export can simply choose to not use colored text.
We on purposely don’t want Agenda to become a word processor, it’s just not the goal and adds a ton of complexity. As said, we’ll add ways to color text and highlighted in limited form, as well as some other text features that have been requested (the next updates brings support for adding tabs, and in the future we might add things like block quote, horizontal separator), but a full blown free form RTF text editor ala TextEdit and/or Word et.al it will simply never be I’m afraid.
I am very sensitive to and definitely understand the concern about undue complexity. I think most discerning Apple users highly value nimble, light-weight apps that can execute without entanglements or excessive cruft (e.g. MS Word!). That said, I wonder if there’s a middle ground between the bloat of something like Word on the one hand, and on the other hand the agility but rigid inflexibility of a simple text editor (e.g. Notational Velocity or Simplenote, back in the day).
Actually I think Apple’s own Notes app strikes this balance pretty well (especially on macOS). It’s very solid, and omits much of the broad formatting capabilities of a word processor (TextEdit or even Word). However it does implement a subset of rich text, including the ability to assign arbitrary colors and font sizes. Importantly, it does these things while not sacrificing reliable synching or a simple + responsive interface.
I am not a software professional as you guys are and don’t mean to second-guess your design decisions. I do wonder though from a strict engineering perspective if it might be possible to implement greater text formatting flexibility (which isn’t to say full-blown RTF editing) without unduly sacrificing reliability, robustness, and responsiveness.
In any event, thanks for your response. In the nearer term I will look forward to the coloring/highlighting enhancements you mentioned.
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support for adding tables would be great as well