Feature Wishilist

Lettera Lettera feedback
1

Congrats on the new beta release!

This is my wishlist for future features:

The Obvious

  • typography settings
  • (custom) themes

Maybe not so obvious

  • Show/Reveal current file in Finder
  • tab spacing setting (2/4/x spaces + TABS)
  • Open in ‘default’ text editor command since Lettera hides some syntax (e.g. shows 2 spaces as tab)
  • focus mode command (hide sidebar + inspector)
  • automation (URL scheme, Apple Shortcuts)

Nice to have

  • heading + outline folding
  • multiple document panes / editors (please don’t make me manage multiple app windows)
  • quick open that extends to headings in current/target document
4 Likes
2

Thank you for the list! Some are already planned, some we can discuss :slight_smile:

Show/Reveal current file in Finder is alrady present in the right click menu in the sidebar:

image
image832×562 60.9 KB

1 Like
3

You already can toggle the folding by context menu -> toggle folding

But yes, I am missing the disclosure triangles from Bear

2 Likes
4

That’s not supposed to be there :rofl:

We deliberately removed folding for now as the way how it works in Bear is not really what people want in a Markdown editor.

We’ll re-add it as soon as we’ll find a good solution to that.

6

I should clarify I was looking for the menu bar command to open the currently open file in Finder. I find that useful to bind to a keyboard shortcut so that I don’t have to mouse around in the sidebar while working.

Can you speak more to this? What are the pain points? I always found Bear’s folding pretty intuitive.

1 Like
7

It’s less about the interaction and more about how it’s stored :slightly_smiling_face:

In Bear we took the Markdown philosophy all the way: everything lives inside the document; tags, for instance. Folding works the same way: marking a section as folded effectively writes a special comment into the Markdown itself. That’s great in Bear, where the file is ours and lives in our database.

Lettera is different. It opens files that live anywhere on your disk; across projects, and often shared with others or with other tools. Writing Lettera-specific markers into those files, just to remember what’s folded, isn’t something we’re comfortable doing: it would mean putting text only Lettera understands into a file you might hand to someone else (or open in another editor).

We’re taking in a lot of feedback right now, and folding is definitely something we want to discuss soon.

1 Like
Fold/Unfold headings
8

I miss Quick Open a lot. I would expect it to operate in the current Lettera workspace.

Another feature I miss is searching through multiple documents.

2 Likes
9

Yes, I agree with your view. For example I’ve always found Logseq’s way of polluting the .md file with property::value for basic interactions like folding annoying. And I have noticed copying text out of Bear while folding is active does a similar thing. I’m not too familiar with how that can be handled by the editor (Obsidian seems to do it), but if there’s no other way than to store it inside the file, I’ve found iA Writer’s approach to Authorship less intrusive than standard in-line comments. AFAICT it’s some form of standoff markup at the very end of the document.

---
Annotations: 0,3577 SHA-256 2f03cc72cab073e43d68  
@Alpha Revision: 2896,547  
...
10

But you don’t have to do it that way. You could save Lettera-specific metadata in an external file in the app bundle. Or use the $XDG_STATE_HOME (a.k.a. ~/.local/state) directory.

One example: folding was added to Vim 6.0 in 2001; it must be storing the folding state in an external file.

1 Like
12

+1 for Quick Open! It’s the thing I reach for constantly in Bear, constantly hopping between notes without touching the mouse. I know you’re working furiously (and super grateful for that), just wanted to share my enthusiasm again :slight_smile: