Make *everything* bikemd!

Bike Outliner
1

I’m really enjoying working in Markdown in bike now. It’s one of the more rewarding, pleasant, feels like you’re on a mac writing experiences out there at the moment.

Could there be a feature (maybe a preferences setting) to treat all text files as .bikemd format? or to provide a list of file extensions to treat as .bikemd? I have to work with markdown with .txt extensions, because one tool I use converts only one-way into RTF and strips markup, so I just lie to it using file extensions.

I get there are moments where editing old-fashioned plain .txt files could cause abberant behaviour if treated as .bikemd but it would be great if people who knew they needed that could override it somehow.

At the moment, I pull in .txt files that I’ve told are Bike Markdown (from Settings→Document) and have a few clicks saying I think I know what I’m doing - but this doesn’t convert existing markdown markup into the relevant rich-text appearance, only doing so when I manually format text as I’m going. The good thing is that this doesn’t impact anything negatively on save, but having the text magically convert would be lovely.

1 Like
2

I don’t think I’ll make this change yet, but I can add eventually.

Just heads up, .bikemd format is likely to be changing quite a bit for next release. I’ve gone through a number of cycles of: expand markdown syntax supported, find problem cases that are impossible to work around, contract markdown supported, repeat.

At the end of each cycle I say “not just do the simples thing” … and then I think well it would be nice if it could also do this … and it should work. And it doesn’t quite! :slight_smile:

Todays approach is to once again do the simplest thing, which will be every row is serialized as a list item. So no top level headings/paragraphs. They will all be embedded in a list item.

3

so this means that inside the actual markdown based file there will be no differentiation between the headings, lists and other items?

- Heading
    - paragraph item
    - unordered list
    - unordered list 

    - paragraph with **bold** text
4

No, it just means that every item will be contained within an ordered or unordered list, but they will still have their markdown block type syntax when appripriate too. So more like this:

- # Heading
    - body item
    - body with **bold** text
    1. ordered item
5

ah ok, thanks for the clarification!