The current Bike 1.0 editing approach (plain text outline, no rich text) will always be possible, all you have to do is choose to not use the future formatting commands. They will be hidden in menu, easy to ignore.
You are also free to use Markdown or any other plain text formatting… save using Bike’s plain text document type and you’ll get out exactly what you’ve put in.
What I don’t think Bike will support is any automatic formatting or syntax highlighting of markdown syntax. Maybe this will change in the future, but I feel pretty strongly on this right now.
This topic is getting big and generic. Unless replying to something already in this post please create a new post. That will make things easier to find in future.
WEll that is interesting!
It sounds as though I’m getting a very different behavior. I made a screen capture video to show how it’s working for me. Could there be some OS level setting that I have set differently…?
Ok, well, “Close windows when quitting an app” in General System Preferences seems to be part of the answer… I usually leave that unchecked. With it checked, I can quit Bike with a doc open, and then when I reopen Bike that doc reappears with expand/collapse state as I left it.
However, what I really would prefer is that I can leave Bike running, close a document, and then reopen the document with the expand/collapse state restored, and that is still not happening regardless of that OS-wide setting.
Yes, this is just unsupported for now. Maybe in future, but it gets complicated. For example if you are sharing the file on iCloud/Dropbox with another user you might not want that state synced. Or if you have multiple windows open on the same outline then need to start storing multiple states per outline in the document. All possible to solve, but requires time and work. I’ll likely just keep current behavior for now.
First off – Bike is genuinely amazing, I’ve been hoping for a lightweight native outliner for so long and it looks on track to tick most if not all of my boxes!
Sorry for replying to the giant-thread-of-doom but this does relate to something already in here:
I agree that having Markdown support is probably overkill - especially since it adds some display headaches: do you visibly show the Markdown syntax (like e.g. Bear), do you hide it unless the row is in focus (like e.g. Dynalist), …
I do however like the experience of typing Markdown and having it one-way transformed into rich text as I type. Slack does this quite nicely, where for simple formatting options you type for example _hello_ and it turns into hello (applying the formatting discarding the Markdown once a matching closing character is found). It feels a bit more flow-y to me compared to Cmd-I, type hello, Cmd-I again.
I generally agree that rich text can be easier to type if some characters are recognized and translated into “richness”. I like how lists work (type - or type 1.) in many rich text editors. On the other hand I feel like typing out Markdown syntax links is pretty confusing and better to just select some text and use “Edit Link” command. Bold, and italic fall somewhere in-between for me.
I think I will likely implement version 1.0 of rich text without any syntax completions. That’s the hard part. Then will add syntax completions after that if I get lots of reminders.
As a vim user, the use of Esc to toggle modes in Bike reminds me of vim’s modes, and I’ve found myself sometimes wishing/assuming Bike had an equivalent to visual mode. However, I totally realize that my unintentional edits are user error and confused muscle memory…
No plan. I think will be a while before Bike is even making good use of outline mode. Once that’s done (and a bunch of other things) then maybe can think about other modes, but not really part of the plan right now.
I would like to +1 this in hopes that it moves a little higher on the list. I’m using Bike daily now, and those two items would greatly increase my satisfaction!
