Link entry - markdown?

Looking great so far! Quick request: I know you’re working on links; any chance you could support Markdown-style link entry? I use those all the time in FoldingText and would love them to work the same way in TaskPaper.

Thanks!

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I’m not sure on this one… I guess what’s the end goal?

The next release will have auto-linking working… so when you type in a URL it will become a clickable link. I think Markdown style link syntax is mostly designed so that you can attach a link to some words when generating a final HTML document. But if you are not generating a final document is there a benefit to including Markdown syntax?

I’m not necessarily against it, just looking for the use case.

I’ve also considered supporting all Markdown inline syntaxes (bold, italic, links, etc), but I can’t really decide if it’s worth the added complication. I know that I went all out supporting all of these things in FoldingText, and wasn’t happy with the result. Though in FoldingText it was really the line level formatting (headers, quotes, etc) that caused the problems, not the inline stuff.

Anyway, let me know what use cases you see please.

Sure thing: I keep lists of links I’d like to read, videos I’d like to watch - primarily technical training stuff. Most times these links are long and pretty ugly; putting the whole URL in the text of a todo item makes the list noisy and hard to scan. Having the link “hidden” behind some descriptive text makes it easy to see what’s actually on the list without having to eyeball out all of the special characters.

I do this all the time in FoldingText, but would really like to switch to TaskPaper for a few reasons. Markdown stuff other than links is less important to me - I realize this isn’t a Markdown editor like FoldingText is. Formatting links just makes my lists cleaner and easier to read.

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+1

I also have multiple sites and videos to watch that I keep as tasks and I always use Markdown style links. Makes more sense to have a clean markdown link rather than a long list of URLs that can clutter the task list over time.

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@bradleyman @slyfogh Thanks for the feedback. Reasonable cases, but I’m afraid a solution is unlikely in TaskPaper 3.0 for two reasons.

  • First building a FoldingText style solution that autohides the link syntax is difficult. I’m sure it’s possible somehow, but it would take a lot of effort and extra complexity to implement in the editor.

  • Second as I’ve said before I think following the Markdown road made FoldingText more complex then I initially intended. My goal is a simple plain text list maker. I want to avoid explaining and parsing Markdown syntax.

You could try hiding your links with folding? Or just use a convention like:

My link label: http://my biglonguglylink.

I know maybe not quite as clean looking as FoldingText, but I think that convention would still make a long list of links readable.

to partially solve the above, I place links as a note underneath a task

would be nice if links had a smaller font and, when marking as done/archiving a task, the note underneath it was marked done/archived altogether
I do understand, though, that is is “my way” so… can live with things the way they are now

I don’t know yet exactly how they will work, but themes might provide another way to solve this.

Hi
Am aware that the Taskpaper format is deliberately different from Markdown (which is used in folding text). However, it would be nice to have a more Markdown-like way of displaying links in Taskpaper. Consider below:

  • [Amaranth Polenta with Marinara](file:///Users/thomasjreid/Dropbox/Dropbox%20scans/Amaranth%20Polenta%20with%20Marinara.pdf)

I have used the Markdown convention to make the link more readable. It would be great if the link displayed with just the words in square brackets. I suppose I could train Marked 2 to recognise taskpaper files, but that involves moving back and forth between applications.
For consideration.

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+1 for this feature.

I work with Google Docs a lot and referencing them is cumbersome:

There are only 8 words I want to see inside that project:

Jeff's requirements
Existing research
    Jeff (2013)
    Alex (2015)

You might have figured it out since, but if the note is indented under the task (one tab or more), it will follow along when the task is archived.

i agree that having these nasty long links in tasks kind of breaks the visual simplicity of TP.

what about adopting footnotes like markdown has? you could put a list of links at the bottom of the file with a simple tag of a users choosing, or a random number, that could be referenced in the task?

it wouldn’t break the archiving of the link with a completed task, UNLESS the user deletes the link list at the bottom of the file. only suggesting that out of simplifying the backend. unless it’s not that hard that when a user archives the task with the link ID, it removes it from the link list and puts the original link as a nested note underneath the archived task.

does that make sense? sure there might be a better way, just throwing it out there to build upon.

hard to mockup with the odd stylesheet shown in the post, but i think it get’s the idea across