I had hoped/planned/tried to get a new Bike 2 preview out this week. Spent most of the week adding things until this evening I realized my build script is broken and my brain is too small to figure it out.
So new release … NEXT WEEK! In the meantime here’s a fun and ugly preview of Bike 2 stylesheets. (It can also come close to recreating Bike 1.0 :)). Lots of performance work along the way, generally it should now be as fast or faster then Bike 1.0, but with custom styles.
Still going to be a while before ready for daily use, but this release (next week! grrr) is a start.
Hum, can’t seem to post video here at moment. You can see video posted to Mastodon:
I’ve been working on my Bike addiction: Part of me really thinks I should stick to Markdown apps (that I can access on mobile). But sadly I’ve relapsed! And I’m back on using Bike again… I just love it so!
I don’t really need tons of stuff from the new stylesheets, but I really wish I could have Headings and Bold text be different… But when I start working on a new stylesheet, I’m sure I’ll find lots of stuff I want to edit!
Ooof, I was hoping no one remembered. Alas I had everything glued together for a preview release for only a day or two, and then went back to breaking things. I’m in the put it back together again phase now. Will try to get an actual preview release, and not just a video, out when that happens.
I’ve been pretty slow recently, holidays, kids home from college and high school. Today’s actually the first normal work day in quite some time. I won’t make predications on when next preview will be ready, but I can say that it’s being worked on today.
And here’s an idea for you (that I don’t expect in 2.0 – but might live in the back of your head):
The only app that’s close to feeling as good as Bike, is the Markdown editor Paper. (I wrote a detailed review of it here.) But one thing it does better than Bike, is the Typewriter mode. And I just got to test a new nice tweak to it!
Technically it’s more of an “auto-scroller” than acting like a typewriter – but I love it! It feels like there’s someone reading my mind, and always gently scrolling the document to where I want it.
Here’s how it works:
You can define an offset, which is whether or not the “middle” of the typewriter focus should actually be in the middle, or some number of lines above or below. I have it so the focus point is a bit above the middle.
Then you define a window, which is a number of lines in which it doesn’t scroll. I have 29 – so as long as I’m within 14 lines above or below the focus point, it doesn’t scroll. But when I move (or write) outside of that line, it will scroll so my current line is at the offset.
It also has options for “Delay” and “Speed” for the scrolling animation.
The new tweak is that you can dim the text that’s outside the focus mode – so you always know when it will scroll.
Here’s a video of what this looks like, all things combined:
With that setup/config I do like the option of showing the dim area so you’ll know when autoscroll should happen. At the same time, for me, it all seems like a lot of config and features to learn for a feature whose purpose I generally think of as–don’t get stuck typing at the bottom of the screen in full screen mode.
Anyway, good to see and I will think about it. At the moment I think my preferred solution would be to keep Bike’s current behavior, but get off my butt and add plugin API so that this more complex behavior could be implemented. Alas, I’m not yet working on plugins and don’t expect them for 2.0.
You could easily remove the animation speed and delay options, though. And then you’re only left with Window and Offset (the latter being a variant of Bike’s current Top/Center/Bottom).
And the dimming of the text is “only” an option of the Focus Mode to focus on “the Typewriter Mode window” (in addition to Sentence, Paragraph, etc.).
I generally think of as–don’t get stuck typing at the bottom of the screen in full screen mode.
Yeah, I get that this is the most normal approach. But in a tall window, I also find it annoying to be at like the second line to the bottom. It also makes it much nicer to move around the document with the arrow keys, as you don’t have to move all the way up/down for it to scroll, making it easier to not have to move to the mouse/trackpad while writing.
Paper’s UI has so many customisation options it’s almost impossible to find something the devs haven’t thought of. Personally, I’d stick 90% of that into the hidden “nitpicking” submenu
That said, I do agree that having to walk the cursor all the way down to the bottom of the screen to scroll feels very untitled.txt-ish. I wonder if this is something that could be solved by a permanent (and non-changeable) scrolling offset by a few lines from the top and bottom when not in typewriter mode?
Other apps address this in different ways:
iA writer forces you to walk to the bottom/top
Ulysses forces you to walk to the bottom and even beyond the top margin
Bear scrolls at very bottom and 1-2 lines away from top
Craft begins scrolling subtly 2-3 from the bottom/top (nicest implementation of the bunch!)
Also, @jessegrosjean , if you use opt+up/down in current version of Bike to move caret by paragraph, it won’t move past formatted text at the end of the line in down direction (but will move in the up direction after switching typing affinity direction first).
In the meantime here’s a fun and ugly preview of Bike 2 stylesheets. (It can also come close to recreating Bike 1.0 :)). Lots of performance work along the way, generally it should now be as fast or faster then Bike 1.0, but with custom styles.
And I’m back on using Bike again… I just love it so!
It also makes it much nicer to move around the document with the arrow keys, as you don’t have to move all the way up/down for it to scroll, making it easier to not have to move to the mouse/trackpad while writing.
