Please, show url's condensed or as glyph

there has got to be a way to have urls’s to documents, folders, or urls could be shortened or by using markdown. something Jesse, i beg you. :wink:

+1 for this : could add an option in style to truncate urls after X characters

I am working in this direction (mentally) though it might be quite a while before I have a solution. As maybe you already know, FoldingText does this for lots of syntax, including URLs.

And it works, but still feels a bit odd to me having syntax, urls, etc show hide as you move cursor through text. Another approach is to use a more “rich text” approach. Where the URL is shown in a popup panel. I’m leaning in that direction at the moment. But will be quite a while before I actually start coding a solution. The sequence of things is:

  1. Build next text engine. 2. Build WriteRoom 4 with new text engine. 3. Build TaskPaper 4 with new text engine. At the moment I’m still on step one. Making progress, but finish line is months not weeks out.

even though you may think Folding Text looks odd. I think it looks fine and way cleaner.

taskpaper 4? i’m all for changes. but man that seems so far away to get this feature, we’ve been begging for years now. :wink:

i know you have priorities. i’m just messing with ya, or am i? :wink:

Out of curiosity why a new text engine? The current one seems fine & I’d personally prefer to see tweaks like the url formatting above, further development of the library you demoed some months ago etc. - refine, not replace existing work… just wondering - I am sure you have a better sense of the big picture.

I guess underlying issue is so I can have better control and understanding of how the entire system works. I’m trying to build nice text apps, but not having control over the underlying text editor (it’s closed source) causes a lot of pain. I figure if I’m going to do this for a career (15+ years in at this point) I minds well own and fully understand the foundation.

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You’ve piqued my curiosity. What is the current underlying text editor?

The current “underlying text editor” is NSTextView. That’s pretty standard for nearly app Mac apps text editing, the exception being big word processor type apps (Word, Pages, etc) and some dedicated text editing apps like SublimeText, TextMate, etc. Those apps all use custom built editors. But general if you are editing text on macOS its in a NSTextView.

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Well, I’ve been working on a mac for 12 years now. I was in social sciences and now starting to shift my career to coding.
I must say that building my own text editor engine could become like the ultimate goal for me.

I’ve always been so frustrated with the limitations of mac os writing engine… I came to the conlcusion that the same issues in most text editors meant that the underlying text editor was the main problem. I spent a decade writing text, and using many apps, and I’m convinced that Apple has done a poor job for “writers” (meaning people using text) so far.

This is the first time I read that this stuff is called NSTextView. Boy I wish I had switched careers way earlier so that I’d be able today to tackle this monster. I’m 100% with you Jesse, there really is something to be done here, something that could be a game changer for your apps. Well optimized, a solid text editor engine could really make the difference.

There are quite a few active open source text editor projects now to learn from, such as Atom, VS Code, and xi-editor. My own editor is a bit more outliner focused then what they are doing, but those projects are all pretty good learning places.

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Hi! I have just discovered TaskPaper, love it very much so far, but this was my very first pain in the arse. If you have to copy paste longs links it’s all becoming a mess :frowning:
It would be awesome to support some sort of [short text](https://actual-link.com) syntax
I like how it is done in Bear, it becomes something like this
image
so if you click on the left part you the browser opens, if you click on the right icon, the actual url appears and you can edit it

The challenge with doing that is that we would lose the elegance, simplicity and versatility of plain text.

@trollfred Sorry, this is unlikely to change in TaskPaper.

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