Jesse congrats on the release, you have my full support (in gratitude and dollars!)
I’m as heavy a TaskPaper user as I am Markdown at this point and have been playing around with the styles for a little while (as you’ve garnered from the previous forum). I’m happy to use FT as my TaskPaper replacement going forward as you’ve promised it to have everything TP would have plus the FT/Markdown goodies and extensibility.
2 missing pieces:
For consistency with other apps that use the TP format (Editorial on iPad for instance), when I specifically have .taskpaper format files, they don’t inherit the same list styles automatically as you would if you added .todo so I can’t combine the two as FT needs .todo at the end, TP strict apps want : on line endings.
You’ve previously mentioned TP smart queries are forthcoming (although Tag, Heading filter and user contributed scripts make do for now.)
For #1 above, didn’t there used to be a taskpaper.less file or integrated styles in base.less that differentiated the styles for those file types? If I can style TaskPaper syntax lists the same as .todo lists in my user.less; without inherently styling all ‘-’ lists then I’m half way home!
Let me restate the problem to make sure I understand correctly.
You are using FoldingText for todo, but you also want to use that same file in other places with other tools that expect TaskPaper formatting.
A possible solution is to just make FoldingText understand TaskPaper formatting, and make it look the same as FOldingText’s built in todo mode.
This all might be possible, but I don’t think it will be a “clean” solution.
Two problems that I see.
For point 1. If you do mange to make todo’s embedded in a FoldingText document visible there will still be all of that extra markdown syntax the the app the recognizes “task paper” won’t understand. So the more “FoldingText” formatting that you use the worse the experience will be other places.
For point 2. I haven’t done it, but I do think would be possible to make FoldingText understand embedded TaskPaper syntax if you write a plugin. Probably would have to use some private API, and if you want to go this route I can try to help. But it would definitely be a time diversion, probably better to just work on your real todos!
Two solutions that I see:
For your todo list, just use TaskPaper. The next version is being built on FoldingText codebase, so it will be getting all the neat features, just using task paper syntax.
Make FoldingText understand github style todo syntax. I’m not sure, but I think there are tools on iOS that understand markdown with github style todo syntax. This task is on my list but hasn’t been a priority to this point. But if there’s interest I could push forward on it.
I see you added the github-flavoured tasks to recent update, although in my case I think that just adds extra cruft.
I’ll probably go with using TaskPaper proper for now, or live with the lack of visual distinction for TP tasks in FT. Recently I’ve started adding markdown style hashtags to Project levels like @mwiik has been so I ‘dirty’ up my task paper files with those as well
However, I like your idea of the plugin. If I was to start playing around with that, what was your idea of a 3rd party API that would relate to this?
In the end I suppose I totally understand your desire to separate the use purposes of both apps (mostly for those not wanting to be overwhelmed by FT), but it’s good to be aware that in reality, there’s a group of us that would rather one app could do it all, and it seems FT wants to be that.
I imagine your thinking is that if there was native support for TP Project styles in FT, it would violate those wanting to make standard Markdown lists proceeded by ```a sentence:``? What if there was just a strict rule that - are tasks, and ** * ** are bullet-lists?
That would handle the task case maybe, though for me its all getting a little to special case. But ignoring that there’s still problem where that sentence ending with “:” needs to be a project with bold formatting or something. There are various ways it could be done, but they all get pretty complicated. For things like this I try to imagine explaining it in the users guide for someone who doesn’t know all the background… it gets really difficult.
