Hey, a user named Peter Abbasi has made a feature request on GitHub, and I wanted to see if others in this community (perhaps to include Peter at some point…?) have thoughts on this.
Here is the full text of his request:
One feature I do sometimes miss from other applications is the option to paste the text currently in the clipboard formatted as Markdown (where possible, i.e., when html or rich-text has been copied). This has proven immensely useful saving so much time reapplying formatting to, for example, an article copied from the web.
I have thoughts and questions about this:
What are the other apps that provide this, and how do they work?
Are there utilities that provide such functions more generally, that could be used in conjunction with Notenik (so that Notenik itself does not have to do this)?
Do we really need to support conversion from HTML, or is rich text sufficient? I ask this because, if I copy and paste the contents of a rendered web page (as opposed to its source code), it seems to come through as rich text in any case.
Hey Herb! I’m very much a newbie on this, and not an expert, but there are text utility apps abound for Mac and one of them might be able to serve as a stand-in to copy-as and paste-as markdown.
If I were to research this, I’d be looking in a few of these places
it seems that pandoc might be able to convert to markdown, accessible through homebrew on terminal, and lastly there might be some apple shortcuts (yuck) that can convert to it.
Other note taking apps that might be able to do this are Upnote and ConniePad, not sure.
This is me just riffing, I don’t actually know the answers. But for your last bullet point, I’m fine with markdown without html - I don’t use Notenik as a link saver or aggregator, I use Zotero and Goodlinks for read-it-later type things.
I vaguely recall Herb gently emphasizing somewhere that he didn’t intend for Notenik to be a dedicated “markdown editor” a la iA Writer or something else. Is it possible that Peter can use the other applications he referred to as an external editor?
Also, leveraging @learg12’s pandoc recommendation, if Peter has the experience he could write a script that processes links through pandoc and outputs them into his Notenik collection.
As an aside, I’ve always wanted to request to be able to access command line programs in Notenik Script files, but felt like I may be asking for a lot. Think something like browse open url but a terminal command in the user’s shell $PATH.
I speculate that one could run external commands against any note(s) in this way, selecting the relevant script from the Scripter Window and/or by adding an option to share a note using a Script to the Share a Note window.