[POLL] What's next for FoldingText?

Hi All,

While kicking off the release process for 2.3, we’re starting to think about the direction of FoldingText. We don’t have enough resources to have a full engineering team behind FT, so it’s very important to pick a direction that will grow FT while ensuring our awesome community (you guys!) is happy.

To that end, we’ve decided to reach out to you and ask if you have any strong opinions on which direction we should choose. Some of these options are much more complex than others. Please pick at most three that you feel strongly about, but don’t feel that you need to select three at least.

If you have an idea that’s better than all of these below, just shoot a comment and let us know!

  • Write more about FoldingText flows and features
  • FoldingText iOS app
  • FoldingText as a web app
  • Allow custom filters / search
  • FoldingText Library (add directories to FT and show sidebar for quick switching, also linking between files)
  • Live preview
  • FoldingText document platform where you can publish FT documents for public viewing
  • Improve an aspect of FT (post what in the comments)

0 voters

Thanks a lot for participating! We really, really appreciate it.

Regards,
Mutahhir

A library plus linking between files would make the app perfect for me. So glad to see it’s still being supported and thanks so much for all of your efforts Mutahhir.

I agree with @zverhope, a library with a sidebar and document linking would be my top want.

Huge +1 to “library” functionality - I have dozens of ft files and would love to be able to quickly navigate across them.

Something like notational velocity’s search would be one great way to do this.

The library feature will be awesome, and an iOS app will probably make FoldingText my favorite text editing app on all platform!

I’d like richer keyboard commands for manipulating lists & lines (something in the direction of Sublime Text)

Hi @makrl,

Thanks for the input. Can you give us an idea as to what kind of operations you’d like to see what are missing?

Regards,
Mutahhir

Maybe TextBundle support or its way of handling inline images http://textbundle.org. I know there’s a plugin for that (Rendered Images), but TextBundle is supported by a few apps and does it slightly differently.

Or syntax highlighting for tables. Or other MultiMarkdown features.

Two more feature requests:

  • The ability to right-click items in the outline view and choose »focus«
  • The option for focus mode to only show the focused content which should instead of ellipses above and below (where applicable)

Here a few ideas, thanks a lot!

Shift-Return: line above
Make easier increase-decrease
Automatic calendar to insert date
Click and drag a line (with children)

The search / filter plugin from @jamie is great. Maybe he would agree to let you build it in to the app somehow, or at least start from there? I rely so heavily on that plugin, I always worry that a new version might break it somehow.

Fix tag auto-completion. I wrote my own plugin for this, and have since moved to a solution that uses Alfred so my tag library is portable across all of my plain text files, regardless of the application I’m working in (useful since I go back and forth between FT, TP and nvALT), but this still feels like something that should be refined.

That said, no one else really mentions it these days, so…

Improve stability. I keep having the application quit unexpectedly – about once per 5-10 documents I work on. (Running OS 10.9.5, version 2.2 of FT.)

I’m glad it looks like library support is winning. That’s exactly what FoldingText needs to be the perfect note-taking app.

I also voted for “Improve an aspect” and I’d love for that to be polished Vim bindings.

Thanks!

The drag to move feature in taskpaper is useful, please consider to add this feature, thanks.

I use FT because it is the best MD editor for writing long form documents that have a broad and deep header structure. The folding/outlining is critical for working in the small and in the large at the same time. This is what differentiates FT from all the other MD editors, so I’d like to see you riff on this theme a little more.

My issue with the current version of FT is that in a large doc with lots of deeply nested headers (broad and deep hierarchy), the outline view is almost as dense as the main doc. FT isn’t scaling well to my larger docs.

A couple of ideas:

  1. An option to limit the header depth of the outline display. Somewhere around H3 my outlines start to get too noisy to be useful, but the exact level where it becomes noise is different for each doc.
  2. Ability to fold the items in the Outline view (folding the Outline, not folding the main text)
  3. A more visually obvious indenting/typography scheme for each outline level. The dots starting flush left tends to make scanning the hierarchy a little tougher, so a more obvious visual indenting, perhaps supplemented with decreasing font weight or grayness as you go deeper, would probably make scanning easier.
  4. Make Focus Heading available directly from the Outline view

Thank you all for your awesome feedback and helping shape the direction of FoldingText. We can’t say exactly what we’re going to be working on next, as there’s a lot to do, but getting insight into what you, our most active users, want has been really instrumental in helping us think about the future of FoldingText.

Regards,
Mutahhir

Hi Mutahhir,

I arrived too late to the party to vote, but the “library” idea would have been my vote. Thanks for canvassing for public opinion. If you don’t mind, I just wanted to note two things on that:

  1. It would be great if any linking between files followed the common [[wiki]] format. I think many of us are using FoldingText in conjunction with nvALT – I for one have thousands of links and am using “Wiki Link 0.2.0” to make this work.

  2. Several recent entries into the note taking/productivity space will show you the tags employed across all documents in the library. In the case of FoldingText, it would be superb if there was a browser for @tags alongside the browser for files. In a perfect world, there’d also be some way to display and interact with the [[links]] too – perhaps even showing which are most heavily used – but I am a realist!

Thanks, again, for all you’re doing with FoldingText!

While we work on some of the other things (Outline view definitely could use some of your suggestions), the above should already be present. Double click on an outline item to focus it in the document.

Library please! A nvAlt like FoldingText with nested folder support is the dream