zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Christoph Zwerschke <cito@xxxxxxxxx>]

Am 04.03.2012 16:59, schrieb Dotan Cohen:
> The idea of  "entered text should be automatically escaped" means that
> **bold** will not be made bold. Rather, users who want to enter Wiki
> syntax would do that in source / raw mode. Isn't that what **bold** is
> (wiki source code)? Why does Source mode exist otherwise?
>
> Of course, there would ideally be a keyboard shortcut to easily enable
> source / raw mode and to switch back to normal mode. To make text bold
> in normal mode without entering source / raw mode, one has the Ctrl-B
> shortcut.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I think I understand your reasoning 
much better now :-)

Anyway, I still like the idea that I can type in wiki syntax, because 
I'm doing that in a lot of other places already, e.g. when writing ascii 
emails or google+ posts or whatever. I also mentioned bullet lists which 
can be input more easily in wiki syntax.

I know my argument is a bit weak because Zim uses DokuWiki syntax which 
is a bit more obscure than e.g. Markdown which is more universal and 
follows more closely the way people "format" ASCII emails etc. anyway 
e.g. *bold* instead of **bold**. In fact the idea behind Markdown is 
that it is easy-to-read *and* easy-to-write. The whole idea is that you 
don't need a different mode or editor when writing text.

These articles explain the idea very well:
http://hiltmon.com/blog/2012/02/20/the-markdown-mindset/
http://512pixels.net/markdown-new-word51/

Therefore, from my point of view it would make sense to change Zim to be 
based on Markdown instead of Dokuwiki syntax. I think Markdown is also 
better supported as source language by Pandoc. But I'm aware that this 
is a very big change that requires a lot of work. A request for Markdown 
already exists: https://bugs.launchpad.net/zim/+bug/495898

Concerning your original issue, I guess the best solution would be to 
add an *option* for disabling/enabling escaping of wiki style input, so 
everybody can be happy.

One issue that needs to be solved before is to implement a way of 
escaping wiki syntax besides triple quoting. I have mentioned that in 
your RFE already. Markdown has escape mechanisms, e.g. you can write 
\*notbold\*, but I think Zim and DokuWiki can't do that yet.

-- Christoph