RE: i wish you could hard wrap gemtext

This is a reply to nytpu’s flight log; there’s no permalink so I can’t link to the post.

I hear you on the hardwrapping gemtext (even though emacs’ visual-line-mode makes it easier).

For me, that’s the biggest of the two reasons I use Markdown to Gemini converters instead of writing Gemtext directly.

The lesser reason is that I also want to be able to publish the documents elsewhere, eventually, such as in books or on web. It just feels good that my “source document” has the full semantics of what I mean in terms of inline markup, but that this gets stripped out so something that Gemini readers don’t have to bother with all that distracting highlighting and can just read the prose.

nytpu’s flight log

Visual Line mode at Emacs Wiki

A proposal

It’s like gemini text, except it’s hardwrapped and uses the markdown double space convention to indicate which hardwraps are “real”.

Update

I implemented it as gmihw.

Nested lists

Now, when it comes to nested lists… this is something I’ve had to implement parsers for many times (and it was among the first programs I wrote back in the UseMod days) and it’s so tricky to get right. It was even broken in lowdown.scm, something I found the other day. I’ve seen it done wrong so many times.

It’s also tricky to emit properly, even once you have a great program that can parse it. I run a wiki and it’s the number one thing that my friends on there mess up when trying to write properly, it’s nested links. There are also probably some bugs in DokuWiki too that make it even harder.

Thoe two things aside—and it is possible to set them aside; I’ve said before that asking client writers to spend a few extra hours is fine if it means that the spec becomes that much better—there is already a more natural semantic for this. Although it’s kinda cumbersome to both write and use.

The idea is you can look at your capsule as kind of a directory tree; each line in your list a link to a sub page with that sublist, etc.

The whole capsule becomes the “nested list”.

lowdown - The Chicken Scheme wiki