Editing - would upgrading to codemirror be a case of a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

#1

Hi,

My TW is a knowledge base (text video image) tiddler content often anywhere between a paragraph and a few pages of text OCR scanned from a book.

My most frequent issue is lack of search in edit mode, this shows up as a time consuming task when I use superscripts to reference or citation end notes. The worst case is when I have an existing sequential set of numeric superscripts ^^1^^, ^^2^^, ^^3^^ and then later I want to insert a new endnote or citation so that I have to manually shuffle up the subsequent end note numbers by incrementing them by 1. The manual aspects of this task are fine but repeatedly searching for the character sequence ^^N^^ by eye in a long text is arduous. My time would be cut down considerably if I could just highlight characters forming a sequence ^^N^^ or even just look for ^^.

When I display a tiddler in view mode I already have implemented a CSS based optional highlighting of superscripts but this is not possible when in tiddler edit mode, I use the highlighting in view mode and try and remember the location of the next superscripts before going back to edit mode.

Are there any issues for someone wanting to try out codemirror if they want to abandon it and move and go back to using the regular tiddlywiki editor? Is this a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? (implying a simpler solution?).

I use TiddlyDesktop on Ubuntu Linux / Tiddloid on Android, I know some browsers support ctrl+F support for searching in the textarea but this does not seem to be supported in TiddlyDesktop.

Thanks…

#2

I know this isn’t (directly) what you are asking but you could create a custom macro called <<cite>> that would would automatically show the incrementing numbers in view mode that way you don’t have to fuss with maintaining the proper order manually.

1 Like
#3

For citation, end notes and footnotes, I would recommend the Refnotes from @Mohammad.
It has automatic numbering, no need to manually insert numbers.

2 Likes
#4

Thanks yes, I considered adding the following caveat to my post but didn’t want to over-complicate my post…here are those thoughts…

I may well use a kind of auto-increment device superscript device along the lines you suggest.

It is slightly complicated by the fact that sometimes there are original author’s superscripts and end-notes and then ontop of that I want to add my own so for example if the author has chosen 1,2,3 I will use i,ii,iii,iv for my own end note annotations - probably just an additional argument “roman”.

Thanks for the suggestion I may well follow up with that kind of enhancement.

#5

Hi, thanks for that. I took a look at the fnote macro within the Refnotes plugin - I would probably end up adapting a cut down version because I often need to distinguish between the original authors superscript convention (they may choose 1,2,3) and my own superscripts which I often which to annotate ontop of the original author’s article so then I would use i,ii,iii,iv to distinguish my annotations from the original.

I was also interested to see the links accessible to various academic standards for this kind of thing.

#6

There is little or no risk, tiddlers are stored exactly the same with the default editor and codemirror, however for you need you may get a lot from the new codemirror 6 especially with wiki text highlights.

  • I support the idea of you using one of the plugins for citing content, then you tap into “tiddlywiki smarts”
  • There may be possibilities of adding to the parser, the highlighter etc but I suggest first investigating existing solutions.

The sky is the limit in TiddlyWiki @jonnie45

1 Like
#7

If you choose to use indents with tabs that may be the only possible difference as code mirror supports these and the standard editor may not, I think other plugins may support them in the standard editor.

  • Codemirror 6 does a little WYSIWYG

There are other editors for WYSIWYG that may store the text field in other formats so check each editor separately but codemirror is the least likely to impact the content differently to the standard editor.

#8

Sorry I didn’t see this before.

If you’ve got footnotes, you should look into refnotes by @Mohammad.

permalink to the bit on footnotes:

I use this in my academic work, but also wherever I want to tuck in some info that can be easily found and appreciated by those seeking it, but without distracting those who aren’t in it for the details.