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nvAlt Migration

monionsmonions
in The Archive

Hi,

I am just testing The Archive with an aim to move all my notes from nvAlt. My initial view is that The Archive is a nice clean environment, works nicely and quickly. I now have a few questions which I would be grateful for you help on.

  1. I've not linked The Archive yet to my main notes folder. Can you confirm that it will make no changes to the note structure (other than edits I make). In other words if I decide to remain with nvAlt, I can just use that and the notes will not have been affected?

  2. In nvAlt, I always indent my lists with a tab. This is quick and makes them easier to read. In The Archive I have tried doing this, but it always creates a Blockquote style line. I have changed the settings to tab rather than '4 spaces' and also tried using the indent function (Cmd+]). The issue with this is that when I then put a url in the list, it displays as text and not as a link. How do I get around this?

  3. The other issue I have is one of linking to images from the note. I am new to Markdown, and have read the suggested Markdown primer. But when I use the image link syntax - alt text all I get is a grey text line. I had hoped that by using this, it would be a clickable link which would then open that file. I don't want the image to be inline in the text, I just want to be able to click the link and have it open the associated file.

Thanks
Mark.

Comments

  • VinhoVinho
    edited March 2019

    Hi Mark!
    About your third question: Image inline-preview is on the roadmap, but not yet working. So at the moment you have to create a link to the image file. This is also not as smooth as it could be yet, see this discussion: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/403/feature-request-link-to-a-file-in-a-note

  • ctietzectietze
    1. I've not linked The Archive yet to my main notes folder. Can you confirm that it will make no changes to the note structure (other than edits I make). In other words if I decide to remain with nvAlt, I can just use that and the notes will not have been affected?

    The Archive will not touch any file behind your back. It basically only reads the filenames and contents at launch, and then waits for your input. It does touch files when you edit them, of course, but also when you click inside them and move the insertion point around. (It saves to and restores from the file metadata the last edited location.) That's it.

    It's not like iTunes: when you point it at a WinAMP managed directory, all MP3 are moved into iTunes's folder hierarchy and you're screwed :)

    1. In nvAlt, I always indent my lists with a tab. This is quick and makes them easier to read. In The Archive I have tried doing this, but it always creates a Blockquote style line. I have changed the settings to tab rather than '4 spaces' and also tried using the indent function (Cmd+]). The issue with this is that when I then put a url in the list, it displays as text and not as a link. How do I get around this?

    Can you give an example so I know I get this right? E.g. do you do it like this?

    ... This is your text.

    1. A list item, indented manually.
    2. Another one.

More non-list-text here ...

    If so, well, that's not how Markdown works: Markdown highlighting treats indented lines as code blocks. (Blockquote lines start with a >.)

    Then again, the highlighting does not affect the document itself, only what you see. So you can use a theme that does no highlighting at all. Select "(Plain)" from the theme chooser. Then every line will look the same.

    1. The other issue I have is one of linking to images from the note. I am new to Markdown, and have read the suggested Markdown primer. But when I use the image link syntax - alt text all I get is a grey text line. I had hoped that by using this, it would be a clickable link which would then open that file. I don't want the image to be inline in the text, I just want to be able to click the link and have it open the associated file.

    As @Vinho pointed out, The Archive doesn't yet do anything fancy with images except make the file path clickable. So if you specify your image URLs relative to the notes directory, clicking on the link will reveal the file in Finder at the moment.

    1. With /Users/foo/Archive as the notes directory,
    2. And an inline image like ![](../Images/test.png),
    3. Clicking on the path will lead you to /Users/foo/Images/test.png

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • monionsmonions

    @ ctietze @ Vinho
    Thank you for your repies. That's exactly how I expected The Archive to behave, but just wanted to check before I did something that I could not recover from.

    On the point of the tab/blockquote issue. It's not that it highlights the block quote section, I could work around that. The issue is that as it is a 'code' section any URLs that are put there just show as plain text and are not changed to hyperlinks - so you cannot simply click on them to go to that web site. However, I have found that putting a space and then the tab, does not create a code section and the urls work fine.

    Thanks for the help.
    Mark

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