#63

Or have edit and preview open at the same time.

You can do this with two panes. If you link them then they stay in sync. It’s pretty nice.

2 Likes
#64

New user here, love the concept.

However a bit puzzled with the dual ‘edit’ and ‘preview’ mode - you have to constantly toggle between both, and therefore I tend to stay in ‘edit’ mode for all cards because ‘preview’ can’t be edited.

However, links need to be ctrl+clicked in edit mode to be followed, and you don’t see images, among many other annoyances (sync is sometimes weird between edit and preview panes with tall images for example).

Have you guys considered a hybrid mode instead? The line currently focused would revert to markdown, and that’s it? Best of both worlds? It would simplify the interface a lot and improve usability massively.

1 Like
#65

It’s one of the major things on the roadmap.

3 Likes
#66

Automatic syntaxing using Ribbon-Menu/Hotkeys.

I want to adopt Obsidian as soon as possible.
But having used to MS Word, markdown and syntaxing is not my cup of tea.
Please provide an alternative way to edit/format notes through plugin without actually typing in markdown and syntax.

Something like a Panel (for clarity please see https://froala.com/) as well as Hotkeys should simplify.

1 Like
#67

But having used to MS Word, markdown and syntaxing is not my cup of tea.
Please provide an alternative way to edit/format notes through plugin without actually typing in markdown and syntax.

Is syntax or markdown your biggest issue? I had never used markdown before downloading Obsidian, and I find it stupid easy to use, to the point that I actually prefer it over using menus to select bold, italic, headings, etc.

I’m not trying to diminish your experience, I’m just genuinely curious if you’re having a hard time with markdown.

4 Likes
#68

I am fine with editing Markdown myself, but I do find it fiddly for some tasks, and visually distracting from some composition.

I’d like to be able to create a list of bullets from a list of paragraphs more easily, in one command - the best I can figure out now is making each line a bullet, one by one. I’d like to be able to highlight text while viewing the preview of the document, without all the link code etc available. There are more, but these are two that immediately come to mind.

4 Likes
#69

+1: I feel that pressing Ctrl+E every time I want to see my changes is a bit tedious. Coming from Typora, I find this very helpful and all. Also, I sometimes have very long notes, and it is even harder for me to locate the section I want to preview. For some reason, the two aren’t really in sync. The best workaround for this is to have two windows, one editor and one preview, but this takes up too much screen space and is rather annoying to manage for each file I open.

4 Likes
Seamless Live Preview
#70

Just wondering if there’ve been any updates on this subject? While the short-term list in the roadmap looks very promising, WYSIWYG is still in the long-term category.

2 Likes
#71

All I’ve seen is Licat’s comment that the API release may slow/stop development for a while if it increases the need for support. Or bug squashing.

API comes earlier than wysiwyg, so that’s a potential extra delay of unpredictable length.

1 Like
#72

So far on this thread, I’m seeing three main proposals for how Obsidian’s future markdown editor could work:

  1. Hide markdown in render wherever possible (Typora style)
  2. Hide markdown in render except for current editing line (Zettlr style)
  3. Discreetly show markdown in-line w/ render (Bear style)

…in addition to the raw, un-rendered plain text markdown view (current Obsidian style).

The Obsidian roadmap explicitly references Typora-style (#1) but I personally would be 100% satisfied with #3, which sounds less complex to implement. Perhaps it could be built first, and the other styles could build from there.

9 Likes
#73

Zettlr

2 Likes
#74

I think it is critical to focus on polishing the editor in early stages of development. We spend >90% of the time actually writing/typing. A good typing experience will allow Obsidian to be adopted by the mass. Most people don’t even know what markdown is. It’s difficult to go from typing in Word to write in markdown code and have a separate preview window. The few good editors we have mentioned all have the biggest focus on its editor (typora and bear) and not on the other functions.

There are a few small tweaks can immediately improve that experience and make the preview panel less necessary:

  • add preview for images in editor view. Just doing this alone essentially makes the editor function more like Bear.
  • formatting texts need improvement. Currently, you have to select the texts perfectly without any spaces on either side for the formatting to work, if you miss a space, formatting no longer works. Example:

1
1694×270 34.5 KB

9 Likes
#75

+1 This is the #1 reason Obsidian isn’t my primary note taking tool. I want to move away from Bear.

2 Likes
#76

-1 from my side, to be honest. This is exactly why I don’t like using typora very much - when I am writing I don’t want to be distracted by frequent automatically appearing format changes! This is what really distracts me… Furthermore, when I am editing, I need to be sure what’s behind a link I’ve typed, for example.
If I want, I just change to preview/reading mode via a simple shortcut - what’s so difficult about that? What is more: although obsidian’s current solution resembles the default behaviour of many other markdown editors (switch between modes via shortcut), obsidian handles this even better, as you can define which view is shown by default when opening a note (and change this default behaviour again via a single shortcut).

This whole thread and the different replies just show that people’s preferences can indeed be very different as everyone has developed - often over years - an individual workflow.

If this feature is foreseen in the middle or long term, it should in my opinion rather be an option that can be individually chosen in the app’s preferences.

3 Likes
#77

The WYSIWYG editor will be optional. You will be able to continue to edit the source.

12 Likes
#78

I am unable to confirm that this is the final decision from the dev team, but Silver did express her vision for the future of Obsidian’s editor, which is letting users to choose between either WYSIWYG mode or source code mode.

3 Likes
#79

In Typora you are not obliged to have the WYSIWYG feature switched on, with Cmd/CTRL+/ you’re in the equivalent of Obsidian’s Edit mode.

3 Likes
#80

For markdown wysiwyg apps it is normal for there to be a source editing option. There’s no advantage to not having it because the source is what it will save.
See no chance of Obsidian not doing the same.

#81

Why do you want to move away from Bear?

#82

Just to add a little to the ruckus:

I write a lot of LaTeX formulas within my files with a fair amount of formatting. It would be incredibly helpful if a render of the code would compress it so something small and intuitively readable.
For me, this is a real bottleneck.