Is there a way to use pound character without turning word into a tag?

Support
#1

What I did: typed in #test

What happened: Agenda tokenized it into a tag. I searched for a way to make it not a tag - found that by right clicking the tag and clickin “Make tag”, it untagged it but also deleted the #.

What I expected: I expect to see something like “untag” instead of “make tag”, and I expect the octothorp to remain.

Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc): tested desktop version of agenda.

I recognize that Agenda has a somewhat unique wysiwyg which complicates possible solutions here. I feel like the “#” character is used fairly often outside of a tag context, and it’d be nice to be able to interpret it literally insteaed of always have it tag the word. I would settle for the “right click to untag” process if it kept that character in place. It seems like escaping it works (#test), but its just kinda ugly.

#2

You can prevent the conversion of the hash prefix by enclosing it in backticks (`) or choosing the fixed width inline style, e.g.

`#test`
2 Likes
#3

hmm that will work well enough. I do a similar thing in github to prevent it from interpreting < as html tag characters.

1 Like
#4

Thanks! Those back ticks work on the pound sign, but what about escaping other behavior such as automatically hiding the query strings when I paste in a long URL? For example, when I paste https://mycolor.space/?hex=%23569CD6&sub=1 into Agenda, the editor turns it into a link that displays just “my color.space”. This makes it difficult to document web development topics when the editor hides the query string. Back ticks are ignored.

#5

Have you tried setting the paragraph style to preformatted? I believe it should leave pasted links intact in this mode.

#6

Unfortunately this not works. Is it any chance to change # to ## for adding a hashtag?

#7

I checked this issue more precisely and the big problem is that tag isn’t just a presentation of content. When I pasting the text into Agenda, the content of the text is implicitly changed and then if I need to copy/paste this text into another editor, or web page, its content is totally broken. This is the big issue for me, especially when I working this way with some kind of application logs.
You talked above that preformatted text style is a workaround for this issue. You are right, but the problem is when I trying to change the style of text, e.g. from preformatted to body and backward to preformatted. Or just set numbered or bullet list on the text. It seems that style operations aren’t idempotent at this moment.

#8

Agenda was not designed to be specifically aimed at this kind of content. As mentioned if you choose preformatted it should alter any links or tags, however if you decide to then switch to another paragraph style like lists, it indeed will do its normal thing, i.e. you can combine preformatted text within a list.

We’ll think about offering a preference to turn off the automatic text transformations into tags and shortened urls, which is probably what you would want I guess?

#10

It is worth pointing out that you can also use the Fixed Width style, which is an inline style like bold or italic. The reason I mention that is that it CAN be combined with list styles and the like, because it is a inline style, not a paragraph style. Any text that is “fixed width” will not be reformatted, so the tags will not convert.

1 Like
#13

This is what I actually searching for, thank you.
By the way I think that this behavior isn’t pretty clear at the moment.
There was no chance to find out this option without your clue.

#14

I would still love a preference or some way to change the default hashtag behavior. As someone who doesn’t use hashtags frequently, but DOES take notes about music all the time, I find myself frequently having to type workarounds in order to type #11, #5, #9, etc. This also comes up frequently when trying to just number things.

One possibility would be a setting to just disable automatic hashtag conversion when typing about numbers, but I like @ansromanov’s suggestion above of being able to set the hashtag shortcut to ##. That would be FANTASTIC for my day-to-day use of Agenda.

#15

We have something coming to allow you to “escape” special meaning like the hash. For now, best to use Fixed Width or Preformatted.

2 Likes
#16

I copied a list from a client’s google doc to clipboard and into Agenda. She used the pound character on ten items. When I pasted the text, I had to slow my workflow and remove ten individual auto tags. Selecting all and converting to fixed width changed the formatting, but left the tags intact. Can you offer a feature where numbers preceded by a pound character within pasted or written text don’t automatically become tags? I noticed that the Bear app does this.

#17

We’ll think about how to deal with this situation, thanks for the feedback.

1 Like
#18

I think this is a slightly separate issue, but it may be related – is there any way to use a period in a tag, e.g. #ProjectVersion1.0 etc? Currently Agenda seems to interpret a period as the end of a tag.

#19

Not at the moment, also on our todo list.

1 Like
#20

Update: Agenda 14 now allows you to escape the pound sign and prevent parsing it as a tag if you type \#ProjectVersion1.0 for example. You can see it in action here