Brett Terpstra
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on Twitter, GitHub, and Mastodon. Sign up for the email newsletter, and keep up with this blog by adding it to your favorite news reader.
I’ve made some important fixes and handy improvements to the Marked Conductor since it was first published.
I’ve made my own config available as an example. Not all of the scripts are polished, but it’s complete enough to show how I’m using it. I still need to finish breaking my Jekyll preprocessor script into more manageable chunks, which is complicated because every little method has conditionals, but that’s coming. In the meantime, you can find my work in progress here.
Here’s the rundown.
Conductor now outputs more helpful information to STDERR, which you can view in Marked using Help->Show Custom Processor Log. It will display a list of conditions met for the current document, along with any errors. You can also now add a title
key to any track, and it will be used in the STDERR output instead of the full condition, which is handy for long conditions with lots of booleans. So instead of:
Condition met: tree contains .obsidian AND (extension is md OR extension is markdown)
You can just get:
Condition met: Obsidian Document
Conductor can now run multiple scripts in sequence. There are two ways to do this.
script
or command
, you can use sequence
. Then in an array list, you can define a series of - script: xxx
and - command: xxx
type lines and they’ll be run in order, with the output of one being passed to the next, getting the final output from the last script/command in the list.continue: true
to any track or block. Normally, Conductor stops processing when a condition is met. With continue: true
, it will continue matching conditions after processing the one with the key, again passing the output of each one to the next. This allows you to, for example, run a preprocessor on a narrow selection of documents, and then run those through a more generalized processor that catches more documents than the narrow selection does.Here’s the full changelog since release.
is pandoc
or is not pandoc
sequence:
key to allow running a series of scripts/commands, each piping to the nextcontinue: true
for tracks to allow processing to continue after a script/command is successfulfilename
key for comparing to just filename (instead of full path)is a
tests for array
, number
, integer
, and float
does not contain
handling for string and metadata comparisonshas yaml
or has meta
(MultiMarkdown) as conditionsCheck out the Conductor project for more details!
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 2 licenses ($39.99 value each) for Acorn. If you don’t need the bulk of Photoshop but want all of the image editing power, check out Acorn. It loads up in seconds and offers all the image editing tools and flexible image processing you need. I absolutely love Acorn. In addition to standard image editing tools, it has capabilities for text on a path, photo effects, non-destructive filters, and the vector tools you need for design work.
From the developer:
Use non-destructive curves, levels, and filters. The GPU power of Metal 2. Add layer masks and selections to touch up your images or make something entirely new. Remove backgrounds, combine images, perform color correction, resize, transform, crop, and much much more.
Check out the Acorn site for more info.
Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, May 03, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 2 licenses ($39.99 value each) for Acorn, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!
New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!
Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).
If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!
So a lot of us are wondering what to do now that Toketaware has announced the sunsetting of the iThoughts mind mapping app for Mac and iOS. It’s very sad to see it go, but I expect the current version to continue working for a few years to come. That said, I tend to favor software that has at least somewhat of a future. So I’ve been testing the waters with some other contenders. The short story is I’m moving over to MindNode.
I’ve always appreciated MindNode (and even added support for it to Marked), but there were some things that made me prefer iThoughts over MindNode. After testing the latest version of MindNode, I can no longer remember what those things were. It’s not as feature rich as iThoughts, but for 90% of my mind map purposes, it looks like MindNode will do just fine. I think the last time I made the comparison, MindNode was lacking some of the features it has these days. I’ll miss Presentation mode, boundaries and grouping, and things like task completion and priority, but MindNode will work.
I’m not going into nearly the depth that Allison Sheridan did over on Podfeet with her mind map comparison, but I’ll list some of the pros of MindNode for my purposes:
.itmz
) files, so I don’t have to fret about losing old mind mapsIf you’re an Obsidian user, there are some mind mapping plugins available. The “Enhancing Mind Maps” plugin is a decent option if you’re in Obsidian all the time anyway:
Pros:
Cons:
I would also point out that the mind mapping built into Curio is pretty good, and has the benefit of fitting into the crazy cool integrations that Curio provides, linking to other notes and objects, and fitting into an overall project management system.
I’ve completed my latest side project, the Marked Conductor. Here’s the backstory:
Marked 2 offers the option to use Custom Processors (and Preprocessors) which allow you use Markdown (and other) flavors with your own commands to convert them to HTML. This is commonly used for processing with Pandoc. Personally, I use it to process my blog posts (and Bunch and other Jekyll help docs) with Kramdown and a bunch of special handlers for previewing the custom Liquid tags and plugins I’ve built, process TaskPaper files with their own functions, and process everything else with Marked’s built-in processors. In those scripts, you can use environment variables like $MARKED_EXT
(the file’s extension) or $MARKED_ORIGIN
(the file’s path) to fork the script and process differently based on things like file type or location. But my custom processor script was getting unwieldy with all of the conditions I was creating, and for people with limited scripting knowledge, it meant having to turn custom processors on and off based on the needs for the current document.
Enter Conductor. It’s a command line utility that can be set as the custom processor in Marked. It reads from a YAML configuration file where conditions are written in natural language (e.g. tree contains .obsidian) and trigger either a script or a command. Conditions can be booleans (extension is md AND tree contains .obsidian) or they can be nested infinitely to create forked “tracks” for handling any type of document. It offers ways of matching YAML frontmatter keys, matching content with strings or regular expressions, detecting whether a file or directory exists anywhere in the parent folders of the file, and more.
I won’t go into all of the features in this post, but they’re all detailed on the project page. The entire project is available on GitHub, but it’s published as a gem, so installation is as easy as running gem install marked-conductor
. Running conductor
once from the command line will build out all of the configuration directories and files. Then it’s just a matter of setting up your own tracks and actions.
I think this project will be of great interest to anyone using Custom Processors in Marked. Whether you’re an avid scripter who’s extended it in interesting ways, or just someone who might want Pandoc for documents in your “Work” folder, but Kramdown for documents in your “Blogging” folder, this project makes it very easy to run Custom Processors conditionally.
By the way, I’m waiting on my Obsidian plugin for Marked to be accepted into the Community Plugins. Once that happens, I have a post all about using Marked with Obsidian that I think Obsidian users will love. Stay tuned.
The Bear giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce! I’m really sorry I accidentally mixed up days and ended the giveaway a day early, but hopefully everyone who was going to sign up already has!
Congratulations to:
You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!
If you didn’t win, sorry, but Bear is still worth checking out. If you’re journaling, taking notes, or organizing information and love Markdown, you should check it out.
Next up is Acorn. Check back every Monday through September, 2024 for more giveaways. The next giveaways include:
See the full list of upcoming giveaways!
If you want to suggest an app you’d like to see in this series, let me know on Twitter or Mastodon, and join the email list for notifications!
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I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 3 1-year subscriptions to Bear Pro ($29.99 value each) for Bear. Bear is a great app for note taking, journaling, and organizing information with Markdown support. It’s gorgeous to work with, elegant in its functionality, and works great with Marked for all of your export needs.
From the developer:
Powerful tools to take notes, plan your week, write a book, or even build a wiki, fast, native apps that keep pace with your imagination, online and off, and send notes to others, export to many formats, and share ideas with the world–if you want.
Check out the Bear site for more info.
Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, April 26, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 3 1-year subscriptions to Bear Pro ($29.99 value each) for Bear, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!
New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!
Sorry, this giveaway has ended.
Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).
If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!
I’ve said this before, but I need to keep repeating it based on the number of queries I get. nvALT is at end of life, unless someone picks up the reigns and modernizes the (open source) code base. As it stands now, nvALT barely functions on modern OSs.
Fletcher Penney and I have designed nvALT’s successor, nvUltra, to work only with a folder full of Markdown files, which is the only way I recommend using nvALT. If your nvALT files are stored as individual Markdown files, switching to nvUltra is no problem, nor is switching to any other Notational-Velocity-like system. It will even work in Obsidian. But if you store your notes as a database only, you’re screwed when nvALT stops working for you.
So please, if nvALT is still running for you, go into Preferences->Notes->Storage and change “Store and read notes on disk as” to “Plain Text Files.” If your previous storage method was database, all of your notes will be immediately written out as plain text files, safe and secure and easy to port to a new (working) notes system. The files will now be in the same folder nvALT shows in the folder selector at the top of the Notes preference pane.
If your notes are stored as Rich Text Files (RTF), you’ll need to convert them to Markdown to make use of other apps like nvUltra, The Archive, or Obsidian. If you don’t know Markdown, don’t sweat it. It’s very easy to learn and it’s really just plain text, so as long as you know how to write, you’re already kind of writing Markdown. It’s only necessary to learn any syntax if you need to do things like create bulleted/numbered lists, add bold or italics, or create links.
So, again, please immediately switch your storage method to plain text files. The nvALT database format has no easy out for people ready to switch. I may try to write an importer for nvUltra (or generally to output Markdown), but I have not done so yet.
If you want on the nvUltra beta, email me through the contact link on nvultra.com.
The Unite 5 giveaway has ended, and I have winners to announce!
Congratulations to:
You should have received an email with details, please let me know if you didn’t hear anything!
If you didn’t win, sorry, but Unite 5 is still worth checking out. If you want to turn your most-used websites into powerful standalone apps, Unite is the best way to do it. You can use the link www.bzgapps.com/pstra for 20% off Unite 5 for a limited time.
By the way, Unite 5 is also available on Setapp, along with hundreds of other amazing apps. You should probably get a subscription.
Next up is Bear. Check back every Monday through September, 2024 for more giveaways. The next giveaways include:
See the full list of upcoming giveaways!
If you want to suggest an app you’d like to see in this series, let me know on Twitter or Mastodon, and join the email list for notifications!
I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 5 licenses ($49.99 value each) for Unite 5. Unite creates Single Site Browsers, self-contained apps designed to work with a specific website. You can create an SSB for Facebook, one for Slack, one for any tool you use that has a website. Keep your data separate, customize behaviors, and see the interface the way you want to.
From the developer:
Getting started with Unite is simple. Just input a URL, or choose a site from our extensive app library. In just a few clicks, you’ll have your very own macOS app, designed by you, for you.
Check out the Unite 5 site for more info.
Sign up below to enter. Winners will be randomly drawn on Friday, April 19, at 12pm Central. The drawing is for 5 licenses ($49.99 value each) for Unite 5, one per winner. Note that if you’re reading this via RSS, you’ll need to visit this post on brettterpstra.com to enter!
New rule: All signups must have a first and last name in order to be eligible. Entries with only a first name will be skipped by the giveaway robot. A lot of the vendors in this series require first and last names for generating license codes, and your cooperation is appreciated!
Sorry, this giveaway has ended.
Stay tuned for more giveaways every week through September, 2024 (and maybe beyond).
If you have an app you’d love to see featured in this series of giveaways, let me know. Also be sure to sign up for the mailing list or follow me on Mastodon so you can be (among) the first to know about these!