As most of you know, I follow Charles Choir’s work and often use and recommend his apps. I especially like his Casual Apps, which generally make dealing with little used features easier. I was, therefore, eager to read his latest announcement about Styling Text via Keyboard in Org and Markdown. I have to admit, the whole thing left me scratching my head.
When I read the headline, I thought, “What do you mean via keyboard? Isn’t that what happens right now?” It turns out that what he means is specifying the styling markup with a word—“bold”, “italic”, “code”, etc—rather than the single character markup that Org already uses.
I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that. I suppose it’s marginally easier to remember “bold” than it is to remember “*” but not much. I can’t remember ever having a hard time remembering the single characters. Of course, different strokes for different folks as the hippies were fond of saying so I don’t really object to using the words instead of the characters.
What I do object to his having to interrupt my writing flow to bring up a menu for the styling. Take a look at the video to see what I mean. One his goals was to have his system figure out what to apply the styling to based on the position of the point. With the current system, I get to determine that exactly how I want it. I just surround the text I want styled with the appropriate markup character. Yes, there are some edge cases but they never get in my way and even if they did, it’s usually fixable by adjusting a regex.
Still, if you’re one of the people who like specifying your markup in longhand, Choi’s system looks worth checking out.