Track all markdown

[iamdannywyatt]

Is there a way to find all the markdown in a file?
For example, I pasted the documentation for ffmpeg, which is looooong

Some things are more obvious to see such as links, because they become blue. But others are not as obvious such as at one point I have an underscore and the text after that becomes italic, and then suddenly goes back to normal.

I would like to track all of these things so I could add the \ to disable the markdown. Something similar to when we try to find a specific word and hitting “Next” will show the next word and then the next, etc?

Hope it makes sense

[mr_abomination]

My best bet would be changing to source mode, then doing a ctrl/cmd + f to search for any underscores or asterisks

If you know that none of the asterisks/underscores are supposed to be used as formatting, you could also do a find and replace for them

[holroy]

Why do you want to remove/escape all the markdown? Aren’t you then better off with storing it as a pure text file?

You need to do a proper parsing to properly detect bold, italics, lists, links, headings, quote/code blocks, and what not to properly remove all markdown.

[iamdannywyatt]

@mr_abomination

My best bet would be changing to source mode, then doing a ctrl/cmd + f to search for any underscores or asterisks

I’m looking for a way to delete all markdown, not just underscores or asterisks. That includes external links, links to other notes, and any other markdown that I’m not aware of since I’m still new to markdown.

It would be great if Obsidian would just highlight words and sentences that are being affected by markdown.

[iamdannywyatt]

@holroy

Why do you want to remove/escape all the markdown? Aren’t you then better off with storing it as a pure text file?

I use Obsidian now more as a “Tips” app where I store “How To” documents I write (for example, How to do XYZ in Obsidian) and then use Apple Notes as my “normal” notes app. So in this case I would like to have the ffmpeg documentation available in Obsidian, next to other ffmpeg tips.
Plain text would be an option, if Obsidian was able to read those files, but I guess it can’t? At least I tried to move a .txt file into my vault and it didn’t show up in the browser. Am I missing something?

It seems that other people kind of wish this was a feature:

Edit in plaintext mode

This can be already done in few ways, depending on what advanced functionality do you want to strip/preserve/add. So IMHO, this request can be archived. (a) In OS, Set preferred default app for opening/editing “.md” files. Then in Obsidian use command/hotkey “Open in default app”. (b) Use theme, e.g. Theme: Simple Plaintext (c) Use CSS snippet which modifies/preserves only features that you want. For example the following shows headers in standard font-size and removes strike-through line bu…

And while I was writing this reply, I installed a plugin that does just this! It would be great if it was a native thing, but this plugin seems to do the job:

GitHub - dbarenholz/obsidian-plaintext: Adds support for plaintext editing...

@holroy

properly remove all markdown

My goal was not to remove all markdown. I just wanted to find what’s markdown and what’s not, because in an long document, maybe I don’t mind if something is bold or italic, but if they are using something else that is not as obvious and it affects readability, then I would like it to be “searchable”, if that makes sense?

Anyway, that plugin is doing the job.
Appreciate your help!