u/NamelessParanoia

NotepadMD 1.5 - Links and Table of Contents (plus scroll position whack-a-mole)
▲ 19 r/mdhandbook+1 crossposts

NotepadMD 1.5 - Links and Table of Contents (plus scroll position whack-a-mole)

It's been a bit of a long time coming, but I finally managed to get version 1.5 out with better support for cross document links and support for table of contents. Use of [TOC] as a tag in markdown will produce an auto generated, auto-updating table of contents. If you have other table of contents tag formats, we support every tag format we could find. Oh, and our word export creates an actual word table of contents for that, not just a list of links.

Cross document links was a bit of a hard subject - Obsidian style links are standard, so we support those. GFM slugs are different but "more correct" so we support those as well. Those are both a bit fragile though - if someone comes along and changes a heading name in a document you've linked to then your link gets broken, so we also support ID based heading links. That does need you to write the id to the end of the heading, which possibly involves updating the other file to add a heading, but it's worth it to keep references stable in codebase documentation. You can pick the model you prefer.

Outside of that, the back and forward navigation needed to get smarter and take you to the right scroll position in the target document. That was a pig as there's a lot at play with document dynamic loading, but hopefully you'll find it's all working pretty smoothly now.

The usual general quality of life updates too - users reported loss of selection highlight so that's fixed along with some other issues and bug fixes. All in the release notes. Starting to get close to where I envisioned the "base" functionality being!

u/NamelessParanoia — 7 days ago

Okay, so after quite lot of effort, the UI has been significantly upgraded. The window is chromeless, with menus embedded on the title bar and the clunky ass "vibe-coded" top tool bar is gone! Huzzah! Hopefully you'll all agree it looks a damn site better. Maybe now it looks good enough that you can recommend it to your friends... There was a whole bunch of other stuff too of course - I was told that my modal file dialogue were "Giving users the ick", so I fixed all the issues I was having with native file dialogues in my host and made native dialogues the default (the modals can be turned back on in settings).

There's also Notepad++ style find/find in files now, where I've tried to make the UI as nice as possible. Really hoping people find that super useful.

Oh - and there's a backward and forward button so you can keep track of the docs you've navigated between. Sounds minor, but that's going be huge for the next update when sectional navigation comes in and it supports tables of contents plus links to headers in other documents (I'm aiming for broad compatibility with existing documents from other systems that already do that).

u/NamelessParanoia — 25 days ago

Okay, so after quite lot of effort, the UI has been significantly upgraded. This was the number 1 criticism I had when I first released. The window is now chromeless, with menus embedded on the title bar and the clunky ass "vibe-coded" top tool bar is gone! Huzzah! Hopefully you'll all agree it looks a whole load better. Maybe now it looks good enough that you can recommend it to your friends... There was a bunch of other stuff too of course - I was told that my modal file dialogue were "Giving users the ick", so I fixed all the issues I was having with native file dialogues in my host and made native dialogues the default (the modals can be turned back on in settings).

There's also Notepad++ style find/find in files now, where I've tried to make the UI as nice as possible. Really hoping people find that super useful.

Oh - and we have a new backwards and forward button so you can keep track of the docs you've navigated between. Sounds minor, but that's going be huge for the next update when sectional navigation comes in and it supports tables of contents plus links to headers in other documents (I'm aiming for broad compatibility with existing documents from other systems that already do that).

u/NamelessParanoia — 25 days ago