Reveal Source on Hover in Live Preview
or, X-Ray Mode
Live Preview marries the best of both of Markdown’s worlds: the source and the product. Without sacrificing the bare-metal nature of Markdown coding for WYSIWYG abstractification and bloat, Live Preview brings immediate gratification to the efforts of manually typing out every formatting token (or, type-setting? Sorry…)
However, one friction point remains where Source Mode has Live Preview beat: re-entering a formatted element by mouse. Without any hidden or active elements, where you click is where you go (WYCIWYG?), however in Live Preview, you have to contend with ambiguous spacing (around transclusions), active links, and multi-clicking embed-style elements.
Instead, imagine if the cursor revealed the source around it (defined by some radius), and like a magnifying glass peering into the code, disabled the live preview of those nearby elements. Then, you could still glance around the document in Live Preview mode, but when you want to focus and work somewhere, you simply move your mouse over the point of interest and dive in.
Use case or problem
- Live Preview Issues
- Newline characters around previewed elements can be ambiguous
- Entering certain blocks is tedious
- Selecting/Modifying links is tedious
Proposed solution
- X-Ray Mode: The cursor reveals nearby elements on hover, like a magnifying glass.
- Artistic rendering of X-Ray radius (e.g. live preview outside radius and parallaxing source inside) optional.
Current workaround (optional)
- Turn off Live Preview to do detail work on Note
- Cannot reference transclusions in-page while working, et cetera.
Related feature requests (optional)
- If any exist, please let me know!