Hacker News Reader

Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

Four bits of feedback:

1. How do I select the font to use? The variable-width default font feels entirely out of place for me with Markdown.

2. This could dearly use integration with Prettier (https://prettier.io) or a similar tool for those of us fussy with formatting details.

3. The lack of Multimarkdown syntax like cross-references (http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/cross-references.h...) is painful for those of us with elaborate note-keeping. It's doubly painful that Obsidian apparently has its own invented syntax instead of using what's already been around for years and years with MMD.

4. How in the world do I link between files? Nothing I do works, and there's no help document and not even a "copy as link" on the right click menu.

View on HN

Sorry for the confusion! Help docs are in Settings > Help.

It's kind of gross that the only way to use that is to have it pollute your file space, rather than just having a document to open.

Also, on Mac it should be under the actual Help menu, the same way that there should be an Obsidian -> Preferences... menu item (hotkey cmd+,) to open settings. Conventions are important!

Totally agree! Still quite some work ahead of us (We're about 3 months from first line of code).

Ideally the help docs can be opened as its own vault and can be a nice testing ground for a new user to play around with the functionality.

Also, I'm annoyed that this labels itself as supporting Markdown, but apparently can't actually handle actual proper Markdown links between files.

This is kind of a sticking point for me, because one app after another has gotten this wrong (see Ulysses' bizarro link editing, for example), and I'm just not going to use an app if it wants to make me convert all my files to a proprietary version of the syntax.

Plain Markdown links should work just fine if you use relative paths to files within the vault folder selected.

Is it not working for you?

It doesn't work at all. See screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/sG9v58Gr.png

I can't reply to your post further down, but it seems like space characters aren't allowed by Markdown spec. Apparently you have to convert it to "%20" :(

For deeply nested posts, you have to click on the "X minutes ago" header to get the reply option to show up.

It looks like when I add the angle brackets that CommonMark allows to circumvent the spaces thing, some variations still don't work: https://i.imgur.com/nqiQnl3.png

For one more note, the obsidian.css thing for styling is deeply unintuitive, because you can't edit it from inside the app: if you make a note named "obsidian.css" at the root level, that gets ignored because it's actually obsidian.css.md, so you can only edit the styling with a separate app altogether to create/edit that file directly.

Thank you for the tip!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com