We need to make a distinction between two major use cases: 1. tiddly fiddling 2. taking notes / authoring
For tiddly fiddling such as coding or working on a website etc, it is OK with intricate constructions and looking up commands etc. For note taking or topic-focused authoring it is not reasonable to force the author interrupt his topical flow with "system things". It is this latter case that I'm concerned about. The complexity of things have to "take place" somewhere. The difference between the two use cases is that #1 can have complexity at front and be exposed to it but for #2 it MUST be hidden. IMO your prevous demo with syntax ´.i.r.j.c.cp ...is "pretty close to good" for user #2: Now, I'm assuming he can create custom classes (when he eventually switches over to fiddling). When taking notes or authroing you only need a few recurring classes, so they can be directly named e.g "details" and "summary" etc. BUT for user #2 the indicator (´) has to be as easy to type as most other things. I guess tick is OK but having to use a sepate tool for it is IMO a no-go because it totally hijacks your attention. SO what are the options for indicators? I've asked if a single period (.) could work but I take the silence to mean "no". How about a *period AND some other standard character, even a letter or a word*, e.g: .D My text -or- .DETAILS My text This make things very clear both when authoring and when reading the code. It is fairly close to markdown. *And the specific indicator can itself bring default styling!* In other words, there would be multiple indicators, but one would likely only need very few. One could potentially add actual style classes to it like so: .DETAILS.red My text The first period doesn't mean anything by itself. The *second *period means the same as the periods in your .c.cp.foo cases. () Again, this is *very *clear and there's minimal hijacking of brain compared to defining pragmas, clicking buttons, or adding multiple classes. As for breaking at newline vs space-space-linebreak, if it is not already baked into the command, this could also be commanded here: .DETAILS.NEWLINE vs .DETAILS.PARAGRAPH (or some abbreviations) The user must take care to not define class names that overlap with these "command names". One could argue for using some other prefixing symbol than the period, so to not confuse the commands with the classes BUT, again, an author or note-taker is only likely to use a few such commands and there is *less *distraction precisely because it uses the very same character, i.e the period. The author should not spend brain power on thinking about such technical distinctions. Thoughts? <:-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywikidev/667ea1c5-0d48-4aec-98a8-4ee4a6ec756ao%40googlegroups.com.
