This is pretty neat, thanks for posting!
Take what I say with a grain of salt, I don’t know you or your project … in the end work on what excites you most!
With that said …
I think putting to much effort into the editor could take a lot of energy with little long term progress. You could add some unique features (like collapsing links), but to have those features used you would need to put in a lot of effort to make the editor better/equal to all the existing native editors. Lots of effort, and in the end not much new.
Instead I really like your ideas on supporting different views of TaskPaper files. If you set this up to work with Dropbox then it would be something that existing TaskPaper users could immediately take advantage of without replacing there existing workflow.
I think (for instance) your idea of projecting a TaskPaper file into a standard calendar UI is a great idea that could quickly add some value to TaskPaper files. But my take on the best way to do the idea would be not to focus on the plain text nature of TaskPaper, instead just write a view for of TaskPaper’s data model. So maybe:
- Find some nice modern looking web calendar component.
- Use Dropbox to find and sync with a TaskPaper file.
- Anytime the file changes search for “due” and insert those items into proper places in the calendar.
This same pattern could be used to good effect with many other view ideas I think.