[Feature Request] Colours for list hyphens/stars and headers

[Justinzobel]

It would be great to have the option to do colours for list hyphen/stars so they stand out slightly.

I'd also love to see headers that start with a # or something similar. No change in font size, just colour to have them stand out.

Keep up the good work. Because of the internal dependencies of this I might try making a flatpak.

[agateau]

Hi,

I don't think it would be that useful for hyphen/stars: highlighting these is interesting in a Markdown editor to show the user the list items have been recognized as such, and will be turned into <li></li> tags when converted to HTML but Nanonote is not a Markdown editor.

Having said this, it's true that I use Markdown-style headers a lot, so highlighting them would be useful. It would make sections easier to jump to. The difficulty is to figure out the right color to use, as I do not want to dive into the theming rabbit hole.

Having a Flatpak would be great, let me know if you build one so that I can refer to it in the README!

[dlaidig]

While I don't have any strong opinions, I had some thoughts while reading this, so I'll just dump them here in case they turn out to be useful:

• For the list items: Nanonote actually does auto-completion for lists, so one might argue that it is useful to get some visual feedback that this syntax has been recognized.
• Even without that, I would guess that the "highlighting can help to recognize the structure" argument can in theory apply equally to list items and headings.
• Not sure if highlighted list items generally would improve things for me or mostly add visual clutter. I guess that would also heavily depend on the chosen style. One situation in which I found lists really hard to recognize is when the items are long and word-wrapped.
• For the headings: When selecting a suitable style, keep in mind that # might also indicate a source code comment. (Not an issue to highlight those, but the style should probably not signal emphasis.)

[agateau]

For information, I experimented with just making lines starting with # bold, and I like it:

You can try it from the highlight-heading branch.

[dlaidig]

I also like it. :)

One thing I noticed is that on Breeze Dark (and probably on all dark themes), the bold font stands out a lot less than on light themes. But I guess that is just how it is. Probably still better than using colors.

I also quickly played around with some source code and while I found it a bit irritating sometimes, I don't think it's a big issue. It will anyway only affect top-level comments, and in the worst case, one can always temporarily indent the whole code block.

Btw, is it on purpose that the CI did not run for this branch? I guess it's probably caused by the change in 5ac52821ee7af1b51d269df1a0155f2c771764a4.

[agateau]

I also quickly played around with some source code and while I found it a bit irritating sometimes, I don't think it's a big issue. It will anyway only affect top-level comments, and in the worst case, one can always temporarily indent the whole code block.

Just pushed the changes and published 1.3.92 which contain them!

Btw, is it on purpose that the CI did not run for this branch? I guess it's probably caused by the change in https://github.com/agateau/nanonote/commit/5ac52821ee7af1b51d269df1a0155f2c771764a4.

Yes, this is to avoid an annoying issue with GitHub CI: if the CI is configured to build on all pushes and on all PRs, then when one opens a PR, all builds happen twice: once for the push and once for the PR.

[agateau]

I am going to close this now that 1.3.92 is out.