Bike: adding Notes capability

I’ll throw my hat in the ring to suggest that you should not add support for H1, H2, H3. The problem is that one’s position in an outline is always relative, whereas heading tags like this always count from the root. This creates a lot of opportunity for time-wasting refactorings, e.g. if you choose to move a subtree higher in the outline…

I think it could make sense to have some kind of heading tag, but there should be no significance to the heading-level; ideally, all headings would be <H1> but perhaps their formatting would depend on how they are nested. This was actually originally the intention of HTML5, but this aspect of HTML5 was never correctly implemented by vendors so it was abandoned (see here for some discussion: HTML 5's headings outline algorithm - ADG). In my personal notes, I have also written about the importance of relative hierarchy: absolute vs. relative hierarchy in document markup languages | Jon Sterling's Forest.

What if there was an option to simply apply automatic heading tags/styling? No manual intervention required when moving content.

Not sure that’s the best option either, but I don’t see a lot of downside.

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It sounds potentially cool! Just to say, I have personally been avoiding most formatting except a bit of bold here and there, and find that it works pretty well for me. So I like the simplicity of the tool and its formatting facilities as it is, and hesitate to call for increasing the complexity of this aspect…

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That’s definitely a cleaner way to do things, and is the model that TaskPaper takes. Maybe it’s what I’ll do in Bike too. The problem though is that it enforces outline structure on your writing which might not always be wanted. For example I could imagine creating an outline structure like:

  • document1
    • H1
    • P
    • H2
  • document2

That is in some parts of my outline I would use outline structure to organize things. In other parts of my outline I would edit using a flat unindented rich text style.

Anyway I’m not working on this yet, but good to think about.

Related it would be very nice to have a clean mapping between Markdown and Bike. So you could open a Markdown file in Bike, make some edits, and then save it back as Markdown. And the hard part is having both the editing version in Bike, and the saved Markdown from Bike look natural to their format/environment.

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An important point I agree with and think deserves emphasis. While formatting can add clarity to text¹, the use of which is to embody meaning, it can also project a theatrical effect that upstages meaning. Any formatting added to something as deliberately elegant in its direct and simple handling of words should be carefully weighed against the inherently misleading use of emphatic text formats: we tend to write louder and more emphatically when we don’t write good. To me, Bike is and will always be a writing tool; it is not and will never be a publishing tool. I encourage the developer and the community to only add complexity that helps us write better, think better, and communicate textual meaning better².

¹Someone posted in favor of heading formats for paragraphs because it would help them orient the reader of their outline. My experience with Bike in the single afternoon I used it already has me noting that as a feature request … but I also responded to the discomfort of not having headings by more keenly writing. I’ve concluded that heading formats are necessary — one invents them by proxy with whatever tools one has — but I still think every decision about adding formatting to Bike should be close-shaved by the razor of textual meaning.

²The reader might compare Bike to the popular Web-document publishing app Craft. Craft is beautifully, thoughtfully done: it allows people to publish, with minimal fuss, text on the Web that looks professionally produced. It’s big of speechifying, and is content agnostic: it means good because it looks good. It has at least 10 paragraph formats and 4 character formats. It has 24 pre-set page styles. It uses color everywhere, usually to good effect. They are excellent, different, programs. I find the difference meaningful in this context.

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