Fred K. Schott joins the party again to discuss all the new and fun changes in Astro 2. Nick and KBall dig in on what’s new, what’s exciting, and what to expect from the framework built around content.

If you loathe Markdown, read this. If you love Markdown, read this.

I truly loathe Markdown. Truly. But given the widespread use of Markdown, it might seem strange that I have such aversion to it. If you somehow really like it, or are so used to it by now, you might be tempted to think I’m the oddball. But I’m definitely not alone in my dislike of the format…

It’s popular and got a lot wrong, but also a lot right. 🤔

🏂 Fantastic – local use, security, syntax highlighting, dark mode, source file saving, international, presentation mode, PPT Mode, single edit mode, export file, internal jump, document auto typesetting, picture upload, LaTeX, Mermaid, PlantUML, Markmap.

🎊 Beauty – minimalist design style, folder + file list + editor 3 column mode.

🚄‍ Fast – using Swift5 native development, the performance experience is much better compared to the Web.

🥛 Simple – very light, pure editor input experience, many shortcut keys to help you fast.

There’s a long history of timeline tools for the web, but most of them had you inserting the data into an XML file, a JSON object, or worse yet: the HTML itself. Markdown-style plain text to the rescue?

Lots of cool stuff for Markdown authors in April’s VS Code release. Namely:

• drag and drop files into the editor to create a Markdown link
• find all references to header|links|files|urls inside of Markdown
• rename headers|links inside Markdown (and propagate the changes)
• rename Markdown files (and propagate to all references)

The Dendron team is excited because their primary vault hosts over 400k lines of Markdown 🤯

VS Code, and IDEs more broadly, help developers manage large code bases by making available tools to leverage and manipulate the syntax of programming languages. By shifting some of this tooling to markdown, can we do the same for large Markdown repositories?

Knut Melvær with a thoughtful attack on one of my all-time favorite tools:

Markdown is a signifier for the developer and text-tinkerer culture. But since its introduction, the world of digital content has also changed. While Markdown is still fine for some things, I don’t believe it’s should be the go-to for content anymore.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Markdown wasn’t designed to meet today’s needs of content.
2. Markdown holds editorial experience back.

Now, I did say it’s a thoughtful atttack and it’s also a long one (30 minute read). Knut does the work, diving deep into Markdown’s history and John Gruber’s desires for it:

I want to build my advice against Markdown by looking back on why it was introduced in the first place, and by going through some of the major developments of content on the web. For many of us, I suspect Markdown is something we just take for granted as a “thing that exists.” But all technology has a history and is a product of human interaction. This is important to remember when you, the reader, develop technology for others to use.

I’m still setting up my new rig and best-tools-for-markdown-based-workflows is on my mind. This one has a lot going for it: MIT licensed, theme-able, and feature-full.

What do you use to edit .md files these days? Anything good enough to pull you out of your code editor?

The motivation for building Slidev:

I always found myself spending too much time styling and layouting slides when using apps like PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides. Whenever I need to share code snippets, I would also need to use other tools to generate the highlighted code as images over and over again.

So as a frontend developer, why not solve it the way that fits better with what I am good at?

Looks slick: themeable, hackable, and you write your slides in Markdown. 👌

whereas most tools (try to make it) easy to get notes in, they tend to make it hard to get them back out later, and it only gets worse as you add more notes. Dendron helps you get notes back out and works better the more notes you have.

There are a zillion and one note taking apps out there, but I like how Dendron positions itself here. I’ve never had a note-taking system that I stuck with, mostly because I rarely go back and find things in my notes that are useful. Most of that’s on me, but I wonder if some of it is on my tools not making retrieval a priority…

Use it to discover markdown files, read documentation directly on the command line and stash markdown files to your own private collection so you can read them anywhere. Glow will find local markdown files in subdirectories or a local Git repository.

By the way, all data stashed is encrypted end-to-end: only you can decrypt it

Write your slides in Markdown and play pre-recorded code blocks with codio.

Part mind mapping tool, part wiki, and entirely written in Markdown. Manage your knowledge inside VS Code and publish to the world via GitHub pages (or your favorite static website host).

A reimplementation of Markmap adding CLI usage, multiline text support, and more. Tryable right here.

Press was created as a proof-of-concept for exploring Kotlin Multiplatform, as well as the author’s frustration from the lack of minimal markdown note taking apps that work on all platforms, especially Android and macOS. If you relate to either of these reasons, Press is looking for contributors.

Markdown editors are the new Twitter clients.

What you see is what you paste. No WYSIWIG, no formatting pasted from the web, and no features you don’t need or want.

GitHub sync is still in-progress, but this repo is worth a ⭐️ in the meantime.

This is like Markdown on steroids.

It supports diagrams, calendars, equations, and other features as extensions of Markdown syntax.

This is useful for making sure things look right before pushing your content up to GitHub for serving. It’s better than python -m http.server and the like because it handles lack of file extensions and absolute paths better.

It doesn’t support Jekyll-based GitHub pages, but it will take your Markdown files and send them off to api.github.com/markdown for character-perfect rendering.

The thing about taking notes apps is everyone likes ‘em a bit different. Here’s what the author of Notable was after:

Notes are written and rendered in GitHub-flavored Markdown, no WYSIWYG, no proprietary formats, I can run a search & replace across all notes, notes support attachments, the app isn’t bloated, the app has a pretty interface, tags are indefinitely nestable and can import Evernote notes (because that’s what I was using before).

If that resonates with you, click through. 😄

Strapdown.js makes it embarrassingly simple to create elegant Markdown documents. No server-side compilation required. Use it to quickly document your projects, create tutorials, home pages, etc

Just include strapdown’s script tag in an html doc and start writing. It’s almost too easy. 11 themes to choose from, too.

It allows complex layouts to be defined with CSS and JavaScript, while writing the content in a friendly, minimal syntax close to Markdown or LaTeX.

Lots of nice output examples in the README.

Built with VueJS and Express.

For turning HTML in to Markdown. That’s what.

Lots of tools convert Markdown to HTML, but going in the other direction isn’t always so easy. Turndown makes it easy, and even provides a web interface so you can paste in your mark⬆️ and copy out some mark⬇️.