[…]Byword for keyboard nerds — Brett Terpstra[…]…

I hadn’t thought about actually digging into the keybindings. Genius. I’m a Keyboard Maestro + LaunchBar junkie with all kinds of navs, scripts, and RegEx text filters attached to my standard keys “dynamically” based on conditionals and other “activation modifiers”, but many of the 2-or-so thousand (!) macros/scripts use ugly workarounds. This article opened up a whole new world I look forward to exploring. Thanks!

I hadn’t thought about actually digging into the keybindings. Genius. I’m a Keyboard Maestro + LaunchBar junkie with all kinds of navs, scripts, and RegEx text filters attached to my standard keys “dynamically” based on conditionals and other “activation modifiers”, but many of the 2-or-so thousand (!) macros/scripts use ugly workarounds. This article opened up a whole new world I look forward to exploring. Thanks!

Then why would you be buying a Markdown editor in the first place?

for the preview pane?, because “marked“ doesn’t work on snow leopard any more? ;+)

but seriously, that’s a great question, and i see my point needs some more nuance.

first of all, you’ve created a great list there, and even though i did not take the time to think through every one of the suggestions, i can tell that you probably did, so i would expect that all of them are well-specified…

and i love the fact that you floated this list of well-thought-out suggestions publicly… that kind of push for thoughtful interaction is something i would like to see more of, from people in general, so i applaud you. i can’t help but think that we humans are squandering the communication potential with which this century has blessed us…

and if we learn to do it with software design, maybe we can leverage that to ending war, and hunger, and poverty, and violence, and…

so please understand i admire your list, i do.

but here’s the flip side of it. partly because this list is so extensive, halfway through i started getting the feeling that this editor would be doing so many keystrokes for me that it would start to make me a bit dizzy…

so if i started at zero, and jumped into all of them, at once, i might feel i’d lost control.

but don’t get me wrong. i can most definitely see the appeal of the ones that i can grok…

indeed, when i first used multimedia composer, and had created an unordered list, and hit the “enter” key, and it inserted the asterisk for me to start off the next line, i let out a little whistle. whoa, i said, that’s cool, and helpful, and neat.

and i imagine that every one of your features might be like that — or even would be – if i could just introduce ‘em more gradually into my workflow, rather than get hit with all at once.

and heck, maybe i’m wrong, and i really could handle all of ‘em at once, i dunno. but it seemed to me that the list of all of them was “too much”, that a robot had taken over the machine from me.

so i thought an option to turn any one or more of them off would be a nice concession to the user.

do i think any of these should be eliminated? no, i’m sure each one would find its supporters, even if it’s one that i might never enable myself.

but i can also say that i’d definitely want to have an ability to disable each and every one of ‘em…

–bowerbird

p.s. i hate the syntax highlighting in “composer“ for much the same reason. i don’t need it, and i find it to be a distraction when i’m writing/editing.

p.p.s. just so you know, in case you don’t already, i created my own form of light-markup, long before markdown appeared, and i’m a programmer too, so i’ll be releasing my own editor-tool “real soon now”. but in the mode of coding to scratch my own itches, my app will contain few of the features from your list. so maybe i’m just jealous that you’ll have more shiny. nonetheless, once again, i admire the thought you did. indeed, i’m a big fan of all you’ve done for light-markup.

–bowerbird

We did make the decision to allow disabling the Markdown editing features of nvALT, mostly because it’s not marketed as a Markdown-specific tool (it should be… I get emails daily from people who really should just be using NV). If I buy a “Markdown Editor,” though, it had better have at least some of these features.