One reason we didn’t go with a markdown editor is that there are 101 of those already. Take your pick.
There are other reasons. We don’t particularly like the aesthetic of of markdown. People use it because it is easy and fast, but that’s about having “commands” to style quickly, not about how it looks. What you see is that otherwise great looking editors are held back by quite ugly markdown styling (eg hashes everywhere etc).
Personally — I can’t speak for others in Agenda — I find it a shame the world abandoned styled text in favor of markdown entirely. Markdown was introduced due to shortcomings in web editing, and we lost a lot when we went that way. But it is nice to have those editing shortcuts, so with Agenda we wanted to try something nobody else was doing: nice looking styled text, but with markdown shortcuts.
Besides those subjective points, there are other points too. Agenda is much more than just a text editor, and that will become more and more the case as we build out our vision. If markdown was our base format, it would be very difficult to build on more advanced functionality, and we would probably end up having to introduce some ugly, non-conformant new syntax to do it, just to keep everything in plain text.
How can I figure out what markdown shortcuts are supported? The whole point of Markdown is to make entering formatted text easier. If I type a dash and then space I expect to see a bullet point, but it doesn’t seem to work in Agenda.
Yes, it does work like that, but actually it will wait until you at least enter some more text after the space. But a dash, with a space, and then a word will convert into a bullet point.
I would like to echo what other posters in this thread have said. Markdown is so useful and common to any environment I work in. Even this community support tool you use supports it:
soCool();
In response to one of @drewmccormack’s earlier comments, the reason I pick Agenda even though there are many other MD editors is because of all of the other amazing features and respectable/mutual support-based subscription model. Other great MD editors, like Bear, require continued subscriptions to use features you have “already purchased”. For those reasons, Agenda is a fantastic product. I just think… and it seems some people agree… that Markdown would take this application to the next level for editors and developers (at a minimum).
I remain very enthusiastic about Agenda and I look forward to the many updates you all will release in the future. Thank you for your time and consideration.
We like markdown too, which is why we offer the shortcuts and export options.
At the same time, it is a bit of a hack introduced because the web community couldn’t figure out how to do real text editing. That’s why it is supported in this online tool: it is an easy way to hack in formatted text editing.
We don’t want to be a markdown editor, because a lot of customers don’t even know what it is, and we also think real styled text is nicer. But perhaps even more importantly, a lot of the features we add in Agenda depend on having a powerful text model. Plain text is not really up to it. Integrating with reminders, calendars etc requires a more complex model, and trying to pin that all on markdown would get messy. We have lots of features planned that would be restricted or messy to do just in plain text with markdown.
Hope this clarifies our position. Appreciate the input.
+1 for your choice on this issue Drew. Markdown may be the bee’s knees, but not everyone uses it. If I need formatting, you have provided it. Agenda is perfect right out of the box (except maybe syncing , but I’ll wait for the next Beta to see how things improve).
I join the group that asks for code blocks in Agenda. With or without inline markdown. Everybody inside software projects needs this.
Simple tables would be nice too. I really miss this stuff and it is really important to my work.
And yes I have MD editors as well. But not integrated in Agenda.
I like to second that post and all the others claiming for wider Markdown Support.
One thing is to “hide” Markdown for the sake of usability for those users not familiar with Markdown behind some buttons (like “bold”, “italic”, “paragraph”, … as Agenda already does).
This does not clash with a broader Markdown support (aka interpreting text instead of pushing buttons). Note taking for some of us means the ability to format notes as needed, and in my opinion Markdown is kind of the smallest common denominator of writing down some text in a formatted, clear and overseeable manner, no matter if it’s (for example) code or pure text.
I definitely miss the inline code blocks the way Bear has it. This is actually an extremely vital feature. I see that Agenda is using fixed width as a formatting option, but it really does not stand out at all.
Mostly I miss how Bear shows the markdown (doesn’t hide it), but still formats the text based on the markdown. I understand Agenda has more functionality than Markdown, but really, I don’t see why this couldn’t be done. Markdown is for the most part a defacto standard for note taking. Having a Use Markdown option would be really nice to have. I understand some users may not want to use it, but there are plenty that do. Basically I end up choosing between other functionality of Agenda or Bear’s much better basic note taking functionality. It would be nice to have the best of both worlds.
However, that aside, I missed the fact that inline code formatting is easier to see in Bear. Right now the fixed-width functionality looks almost identical to all the other text. This is what I was referring to in my previous comment.
Notice how the Agenda example is barely noticeable.
Hmm, for plain text note-taking it is indeed, but for Rich Text it’s certainly not. In the end it’s important to discriminate what Agenda is and what it isn’t. It isn’t a markdown editor, it’s a styled text editor (see Taking Notes). Note that it isn’t a word processor either. You can style your text without having to know markdown, but you can use markdown as a shortcut for activating styles. We don’t preserve the markdown however, nor do we plan to do so. We feel that, while certainly immensely popular, it’s still for a subset of people. A lot of people don’t know or don’t want to use it markdown. We feel the balance we picked in Agenda works well for most people.
Having said all of that, it doesn’t mean the way we display code cannot be improved and it’s certainly on our list. But also here it’s important to make a distinction as the current style is named preformatted for a reason, it’s not called inline code as it was never explicitly optimised for code. We believe code does warrant having an explicit style that can also feature syntax highlighting for example, we haven’t gotten to it yet however. See also The features we are working on right now…
As a coder, my main problem with Bear is that its design of markdown syntax and code block always interrupt my train of thought during the note taking and reading. I feel sick to see the H1, H2, : , ``` , and the link icon all the time. Somewhat annoying.
Agenda has beautiful typography. However I do wish the code editing and display could be improved in the future.
I am trying to paste my markdown guide into a new agenda note but agenda renders it. If I want to paste plain text containing valid markdown into an agenda note, do I need to use a code block? I want agenda to accept the text as plaintext without rendering the markdown.
You could set the paragraph style to “Preformatted” and then paste. I think you can also currently type a backslash, and then paste, to have the paste ignore special characters. (The latter is new in Agenda 14. It is the same as “escaping” special meaning, and can be used for pastes, or typing individual characters.)
+1 to, I think it was mentioned already, preserving the format of the tag / keep the tag visible.
I know Agenda is not a Markdown editor, but supporting it, and Markdown becoming increasingly popular as it allows one to keep their hands on the keyboard and stay productive without interruptions it would be preferred if this option was there. Adding headlines alone with a hash is much more convenient than pressing CMD+Shift+number + when the hash remains visible it’s very easy to upgrade / downgrade the headline by adding / removing a hash.
I think it would be very difficult to do technically. The markdown editors typically work very differently to Agenda. The “metadata” is all in the text, where Agenda stores that separately. Don’t think it would be be trivial to support, I’m afraid.
, but I’ll wait for the next Beta to see how things improve).
