Forum Archive

Over the years, I've found apps like VoodooPad and Trunk Notes rather useful for certain projects, in that being able to link to related internal documents easily makes for a great organizational tool. Some projects are so perfect for the personal wiki format that it's difficult to restructure them in other apps, since you lose so much value.

Unfortunately, VoodooPad on iOS is too barebones to use alone, as you lose out on much of the power that VoodooPad's desktop version offers (e.g. scripting). Trunk Notes is great because it uses plaintext files and actually has Lua scripting built in, but the app has several other quirks that make me wish I could use Editorial instead.

I don't expect Editorial to ever support rich media as it's a text tool, but it would be awesome if Ole allowed Editorial users to reference internal documents in an easier fashion, ala Wiki Links. Right now, you can reference other internal documents using a Markdown link to the editorial "open" URL scheme, but the link is ugly due to length. If you preview the file in Editorial, the link is hidden, but when you click the link you're not taken to the preview screen, so the destination file will again show ugly links.

Is there a way to open a document in the preview window using the URL scheme? Or does anyone have any other ideas on how to use Editorial as a personal wiki - perhaps some innovative Workflow ideas?

The only thing I can think of is a workflow using the bookmark action to create a link and then set to clipboard and put it in the file you want the link in. Like you said, it'll be long, not pretty like with nvAlt, but I can't think of anything else. Though you could do it as a reference link I suppose, still have the url, but at least it's out of the way. I'd be interested to see some solutions to using a Editorial as such.

I already work in this manner and the answer with regard to keeping things tidy is indeed to use reference links. I adapted Federico Viticci's excellent MD link workflow to pick between a link on the clipboard or in the internal browser as it makes the workflow a little more flexible. The great thing about Federico's workflow is that it automates the process of making reference links which is perfect for wiki style linking to other MD docs on Dropbox.

I uploaded a bunch of workflows today, some of which will help you with wiki style linking whilst keeping your MD docs easily readable. If you have any questions regarding how best to use them, feel free to ask.

jonmoore: Thanks for those workflows! For the last one, I assume you're first calling another workflow that gets the open document's path and constructs a URL with it - something like this?

Interesting that you created your own way of capturing the page URL. Just goes to to show how flexible Editorial is if you put your mind to a particular challenge. In this case though, there is already an action in the workflow library called 'Get Bookmark URL' which performs the same task as you'll see in the screengrab below.

Ah, even better - thanks again!

No problem. I did the same kind of thing when I first started using Editorial. It's very easy to find yourself recreating standard library functions in more convoluted ways. But this is no bad thing though as your learning how to put automation workflows together even if they're not the most efficient. The other great learning process is to download any vaguely interesting workflows from the repository, deconstruct them and see if you can hack them for other tasks or just rebuild them to do the same task but in a more efficient way.

Happy hacking... ;)

Jonmoore has the right of it. Very nice Jon. And you're absolutely right. I found I had made a few workflows when first starting out that were just unnecessarily difficult ways of doing things for which actions already existed. Of course, to able to do that was cool, felt good, and had a certain aspect of geeky enjoyment - and was a learning experience as well - so it's all good.