Whoever made Jira’s markup syntax: Straight to jail.
The thing I dislike most about Atlassian products is that each of them has a completely different formatting engine and markup syntax. You’d think they’d be consistent but noooo
In Confluence… the same emojis look different on page title on the sidebar vs the body. Two different font families.
It’s incredible.
Try to do any formatting more complex than none at all in Confluence. It just gets polluted with invisible markup and changes styling randomly.
Atlassian doesn’t even have consistency within single products! I’m using Jira Cloud at work, and while most fields support markdown (e.g. three backticks to start a code block) there are a few that only support Jira’s own notation (e.g.
{code}to start a code block). It’s always infuriating when I type some markdown in one of the fields that doesn’t support it for some inexplicable reason.The thing I dislike about Atlassian is everything from Atlassian
Thankfully these days I spend most of my time in Confluence, which supports Markdown
Both Bitbucket and Confluence partially support Markdown, but they implement it in different ways, which is maddening.
Jira Developers: for the love of god can we PLEASE stop trying to shoehorn literally fucking everything into our platform?
Jira PMs: slaps roof this bad boy can fit so much scope creep
Whoever made Jira~~'s markup syntax~~: Straight to jail.
Same for Google Chat
Obsidian, md all the way down
Hot take: Obsidian is King right now of note taking and I’m all for it
That’s not a hot take. That’s a damned gospel and I am singing baritone.
FOSS LogSeq or bust.
I want to like obsidian, but I find it to just be such a hideous UI. Any community themes cannot fix it. But to mention proprietary. I liked Logseq too, but it has the same problem just not as bad. People really need to not do custom UIs and should stick to native widgets with Material Me support.
It’s proprietary, sure, but you’re literally just editing Markdown files. You can even change it to use Markdown links instead of wikilinks.
It’s mostly the hideous UI that makes me not use it lol
What would prevent a price hike in the future?
A bit vary of investing in anything but free software based platforms at the moment.
Because the notes are in markdown, so are portable forever even if Obsidian went away.
This is the way.
Almost completely pure way of storing ideas. With this I mean that you don’t store unnecessary data such as “background should be white” or “left page margin is 1.3cm”. It’s just text. What’s important is what it says + minimal markup.
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I wish browsers would support markdown out of the box, so you could open https://example.com/some-post.md
Old fart warning!
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.
Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.
Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.
We’re kinda getting it back with the Accessibility tree
In theory, if the page is compiled right, you can read everything right from there. You could also interact with it.
Thanks. This is the first I’ve heard of the Accessibility tree. A quick look kind of spooked me, but I’ll dig deeper.
Looks kind of simple to me at first glance…
There are four properties in an accessibility tree object:
name
How can we refer to this thing? For instance, a link with the text “Read more” will have “Read more” as its name (find more on how names are computed in the Accessible Name and Description Computation spec).
description
How do we describe this thing, if we want to provide more description beyond the name? The description of a table could explain what kind of information the table contains.
role
What kind of thing is it? For example, is it a button, a nav bar, or a list of items?
state
Does it have a state? Examples include checked or unchecked checkbox states and collapsed or expanded states for the <summary> element.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Accessibility_tree </summary>
Looks kind of simple to me at first glance…
Well, it has been a decade since I’ve done anything other than dig holes (literally), drive school buses, and work in my shop. :)
Thanks for the jump start. I’ll add this to my ever growing list of tech stuff I’d like to tackle in my retirement.
You can use Dev Tools to see a page’s full accessibility tree:
Chrome: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/full-accessibility-tree/#full-accessibility-tree-in-devtools
I haven’t really looked for anything that will present that to you as an Add-On/Extension but it’s theoretically possible.
Ok, thanks! That looks like a good start for me.
We’re getting closer to winter. I’ve got most of those preparations done. “Just” have to finish building the heater for my shop. My programming based project list is coming together: learn me some Rust, contribute some documentation to a project I’m following, look deeper into the potential of the Accessibility tree. That should keep me busy for a while!
It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.
The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.
If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.
Discovering obsidian has been a blessing for my sanity and made me less lazy for taking notes.
Plus I can use latex to transform md into docx and there’s decent pdf support so I don’t need to play with the circus of WYSIWYG pain that’s MS Word.
I keep meaning to check out Obsidian, but I’m like you said, lazy.
Be lazier! I believe in you.
Hi. This is your push to do it.
Download it and start a video tutorial of your choosing.
It’s great! Do it!Lol thanks, I appreciate the push. I have more important things to be pushed towards though, such as work and personal tasks.
Change Obsidian to Zettlr.
I think the use cases are different, as Zettlr seems like a pure publication tool but Obsidian (at least originally) was more of a personal note organizer that grew due to having community plugins.
I do agree though that Zettlr is a better publication tool, though I wouldn’t change Obsidian for it as a personal organizer/kb.
Obsidian is what I used to keep my notes while playing Book of Hours. It was a fantastic tool and I’ll definitely use it in the future!
How’s the Book of Hours? I played a good deal of Cultist Simulator, but it tends to suck me in and I recover few hours later without an understanding what just happened.
I finished my playthrough a couple days ago, after 80 hours. It’s much more forgiving than CS – there’s no lose condition, as far as I can tell. There’s also a shitload more to keep track of, hence me using Obsidian. I personally found the experience of tracking [what books give what resource] and [what resources make what crafting recipes] to be extremely satisfying, but your mileage may vary.
Pandoc is also great!
Definitely, I said latex but I wanted to mean Pandoc.
The only thing is that applying a docx theme format to Pandoc was very challenging, although I would blame docx, not pandoc.
I was looking for a journaling app that didn’t have vendor locking, or required some weird export dump that messed your formatting and folders up. That lead me to Markdown and Obsidian. I love it. And when I die, that shit will still be readable by any basic text editor.
LogSeq is similar, but FOSS
I don’t remember why, but there was some reason I wrote off LogSeq. I tried so many apps but Obsidian was the best fit for me. Maybe I’ll have to try Logseq again and remember…
Shoulda wrote down your issues with LogSeq in Obsidian. /shrug
I actually started that afterwards! I have a whole section about my self hosting adventures and hunt for a Google Keep replacement.
Did you find a suitable Keep replacement?
I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to use LogSeq, but for now it’s kinda acting as a Calendar, Journal, Me Wiki, ToDoList, and general notes scratchpad. I’m not sure how organized I can keep it, but it definitely is nice opening 1 app, and being able to put anything and everything in the journal page for today, just #hashtagging topics for searchability/Discoverability.
Sort of…I’m still testing various apps. The big draw for me to Keep was mobile and web apps. I will often sit at a computer to input even short ToDo because phone swipe keyboards and me do not get along. There is no shortage of Keep clones, but a bunch are missing sync function entirely or require Nextcloud, which is way too much app for my hardware and I’m not standing up an instance just to sync some notes. Here’s a not very formal rundown of what I’ve so far:
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Joplin - seems like a solid app and you can easily selfhost the server. But the android app is awful. That and the fact it stores Markdown files in a sqlite db had me look elsewhere
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Quillpad - a fork of Quillnote. Looks identical to Keep. Only syncs with Nextcloud and has some quirks. The big one was creating a To Do list with checkboxes from the Notes app in NC displays correctly in Quillpad, but you cannot interact with them at all. So strange.
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Zoho Notebook - Zoho as a company is likely the closest you’ll get for a straight up Google replacement. But their privacy policy has some concerning statements regarding sharing data with “market partners”. It was enough for me to keep looking.
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Carnet - only syncs with Nextcloud and for some reason the Android app is stupid slow.
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Memos - more of a microblogging app. Similar format to Twitter but you can keep it all private and publish nothing. This one has no official app, in favor of a well done progressive web app. Also stores .md in a db file. Incredibly easy to self host. I keep wanting to love this one, but the single column view (think Twitter threads) as opposed to Keeps grid…i don’t know. I still have it up on my server since it takes almost nothing to run and I keep playing with it.
The two contenders for me right now have some amazing promise and nice features already, but it’s whats on their roadmaps that has intrigued me more:
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Acreom - not FOSS yet and the mobile app can only sync with their cloud. No E2EE…yet. On desktop it’s great. You can use it without an account and like Obsidian, it stores it in flat .md. The To Do/Task function has some natural language processing that can recognize date/time for due dates like “Deploy patches Wednesday at 4am” would recognize
Wednesdayas Sept 20th since that’s the next closest date and the time at 4am. I think once they open source it and at least allow local only storage on a phone, it’ll be killer. I’d love to use Syncthing to just keep my pile of notes up to date between multiple devices. Not possible on mobile yet. This one is geared more towards developers to track projects, even offers a Jira tie in (gross). -
Notesnook - somewhat recently open source. Has great apps for all OSes as well as a web app. And what is really nice is that the UI is consistent across platforms. They have a paid tier that’s a bit spendy for my liking, but they are working on a self hosting option that will be free of course. The dev did tell me they’re toying with the idea of a charge for commercial self hosters, but definitely not for individuals. This one isn’t in plain .md due to their selling point, which is encrypted everything.
Wow, thanks for the write-up. Joplin, Memos, Acreom sound/look the most interesting. Notesnook’s feature lockouts on the free tier makes me feel like they may not be included in the self-hosted option, that seems like a common practice. But I’ll keep an eye out… I’m gonna copy this whole thing into my page on notes-apps for later reference.
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Does it have an app that will sync with my GitHub?
Why you need special app for that? Just sync the files with Git.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good UI, and I’m very picky apparently. And as much as I like Markdown, I like looking at rendered Markdown more, lol. I was just looking at GitJournal and Markor and my god…hideous apps.
I came from DayOne, and their format is some json that I wasnt too keen on for future proofing.
I do that on my computer’s, but I mean on my phone
I think he means from his phone. Obsidian is great to just sync if you have a git client, but kinda a pain from the phone app unless you pay.
At least on Android and iOS. Other systems like PostmarketOS or Mobian can use Git just like computers.
(This is mostly a joke)
Markdown is good. I use it when working in the company since the format is ubiquitous. I do writing my blog posts with Markdown (Hugo for the curious).
But personally, or working with a bit more niche team, for writing personal documentation I prefer Asciidoc [0]. It has better syntax and have some nice functionalities like Table of Contents.
For personal notes, nothing can surpass Org Mode [1].
doesn’t Markdown have a TOC function if you have at least 2 headings?
Unfortunately there’s no way to have a generated TOC within the page itself. It’s usually in a sidebar or something like that.
Could we convert this meme to markdown?
Where is that footage from?
Parks and Recreation. Season 2, episode 5.
Parks and rec
Parks & Recreation
ah beans, I’m late as shit replying…
.md files on
Emacs gang here, coughing in org-mode.
*org-mode
Wait until you learn about Org-mode.
I’m vaguely aware of Org-mode but only as an alternative to Markdown. Last time I looked into it, though (years ago), Markdown seemed like a much better option for me for various reasons. Do you have a good argument for why Org-mode is a better choice for common use cases than the relatively universal GitHub-flavored Markdown?
depending on what you do there are large benefits, for me they are executable code blocks (i.e. jupyter like experience) and way better latex support (if you type equations that are more involved this is rather important).
Org mode is great, particularly if you’re already in the Emacs ecosystem because it can do a lot of stuff. Calendars, executable code blocks, spreadsheets, time tracking, org-roam for more ad-hoc notes and searching, capture templates for ingesting data…
I like org mode’s markup format a lot better than markdown’s. It’s a bit easier to do complicated things with escaping and stuff, and it supports syntax highlighting for different languages in code blocks, and LaTeX markup and stuff (which it can even display inline if you want).
As far as I am concerned the only reason to use markdown is that more people are familiar with it and there’s better support for it on certain platforms. These are certainly good enough reasons to use markdown, but in my experience if you’re in the position to use org-mode it’s just so much better.
Eh, while Markdown is nice I think Dokuwiki’s syntax is infinitively better for any kind of text that ends up involving programming code. It also has a header syntax that makes sense, albeit rather cumbersome. And it also makes a proper distinction between italics and underline which are two different, standard typographical effects and not the same thing as Markdown seems to believe; and between ordered and unordered lists (let alone nested lists).
Just about the only bad thing is I haven’t been able to find an editor that supports it. Probably because, to my knowledge, no self-standing / independent renderer exists for it (the parser and renderer seem to be tightly integrated into the content manager).
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One of these days, someone is going to invent a confluence alternative that only supports markdown and doesn’t have nay of confluences stupidity and it is going to EXPLODE and bankrupt Atlassian.
