Highlighting Syntax Choice :: and ==

Would it be possible for bear to use == as the syntax for highlighting text as well. It is not part of a standard markdown, and there is no real guide for it. However there are not too many Markdown Note Takers around, and bear definitely falls into one them. In order to prevent compatibility issues with exports I feel that bear should follow the most common Syntax for Highlighting as well.

Roam Research uses ^^
Obsidian uses ==
iA Writer Uses ==
Typora Uses ==

There seems to be a trend recently for more Note Taking Based Markdown editors to use the == Syntax apart from Roam, and bear will be a big player in this space, I do not want to see this market get further segmented. Any thoughts??

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Hi there,

this request sparked a very interesting discussion within the team, we still haven’t take a decision yet, but we agree that fragmentation is something we like to avoid.

Best.

Day One uses == as well, even though it’s really using Markdown anymore.

I appreciate it perhaps better to go with convention here, but I wanted to register some misgivings with this switch, since I think there are good reasons to avoid it:

  • If you opt to keep markdown syntax visible, the difference in width between :: and == feels like an unnecessary use of space and an awful lot of highlight colour.
  • It also may also clash with ATX headers, and also with separator styles, which can also make use of repeated instances of the character.
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Just a thought, but would it be possible to make this configurable? Since there is no One True Markdown Flavor, no matter which of the two we choose, someone will be missing the other way. Bear has settled on CommonMark which is really awesome. Highlighting is really an non-standard extension in CommmonMark. I found a list of many common extensions to the standard CommmonMark syntax here: Deployed Extensions · commonmark/commonmark-spec Wiki · GitHub.

I think a really cool feature would be for Bear to have support for certain syntax extensions to be configurable by the user. Typora supports this for some things as can be seen in the screen shot below. Note that Typora doesn’t allow you to switch between :: and ==, but you can enable/disable the == syntax for highlighting.

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I have just started using panda and I really like the look and feel.

I tried using highlighting but I found a compatibility issue when I copied the file to DEVONthink.

Whereas bear/panda and some other editors use ==text== to highlight text, DEVONthink now supports MutiMarkdown 6 which incorporates CriticMarkup.

CriticMarkup uses {==text==} for highlighted text. It defines five types of marks to help copy editing markup and they all start and end with a curly brace.

It would be ideal if I could configure how bear/panda marks highlighted text.

Otherwise, I will have to write a script to convert.

Keep up the good work, panda is a joy to use.

Just started trying out Panda, and it indeed looks like it made the change from ::highlighting:: to ==highlighting==. Personally, I have no strong opinion about what the correct answer is.

However, the fact that the old highlighting ::mode:: doesn’t highlight feels like a bummer. So notes that have been using this for effect, when copied over to Panda, lose the highlight.

Is this something that is in flux in Panda presently? Thinking of supporting both, offering migration, or some other solution?

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Hi there,

When Panda is merged into Bear, this change (along with a lot of other things) is planned to be part of the automatic migration we’ll do in Bear.

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