If you can get a new Markdown flavor, what new features you wish it would have that you miss in regular Markdown?

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I encourage you to read File over app. It is phenomenal.

The choice to hold onto Markdown is an entirely intentional tradeoff. Yes Markdown is missing some basic features, and it could be more flexible, but it will last far longer because of that.

So many apps have added other features, but this came at the cost of becoming proprietary. Now your data is stuck in a format that nobody else knows how to read or write. You can only use it in their system. You are locked out of taking advantage of features from other systems. And if/when the app is no longer in development, you’re hosed.

But Markdown is a lingua franca. It’s easy to read, write, edit. You’re data will still be usable even if a company goes out of business, or an app is no longer compatible, or you simply want to use some other software. You have autonomy. When I copy and paste into a WYSIWYG, I cross my fingers and hope that it doesn’t mangle my text into something unreasonable. But when I copy and paste markdown, I have confidence knowing that it will know exactly what I intended.

But, granted, there are some usability issues. It’s not as intuitive as a true WYSIWYG. But that’s where Obsidian Plugins come in. Who would have thought that simple markdown could turn into Kanban boards, and Maps, and Calendars, and Todo List apps and a million other things? It truly is amazing.

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  • Thanks for sharing File over App. That intention continues in The new Obsidian icon
  • Many of the wish list items in this thread have to do with presentation layer functionality that IMHO have no place in a notetaking, pkm environment based on markdown. To me, markdown is about content creation; formatting of content is ephemeral and at the mercy of the presentation platform.
  • Many of the early wishes by the op and others have now been provided - canvas, properties, publish, bases, and a rich css realm. All intended to enrich textual content creation.
  • I appreciate the design intention in Obsidian.
  • My wishes have to do with enhancements to core search or other analytical capability:
  1. Making complex search criteria easier to use (i.e. multi-line textbox) - I’m having astounding success with regex, but the syntax becomes unwieldy at times :slight_smile:
  2. Additional sorting of results (i.e. counts of finds in each note) - and some sort of weighting.
  3. Enrich the css in search results to allow for styling search matches - (i.e. using regex to find highlights and comments, allow for unique css styling of each in search results - properties as well). We see some of this now in the css behind bases.
    OR
  4. A bases like solution to find, analyze, and display annotations. It would be nice to be able to slice and dice annotations with the inherited properties of the notes they reside. Into my sixth year and the real value in my vault is the writing I’ve created and, particularly, the annotations added to the words of others (highlights, comments, footnotes, and callouts).