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| author | date | type | title | cardCategory | shouldLink | weight | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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2020-11-15 |
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Advanced Markdown Tables | Project | true | 20 |
Improved navigation, formatting, manipulation, and even formulas in Markdown tables.
I am an avid proponent of maintaining a personal wiki, or personal knowledge base. This can be as simple as a paper journal, or as complicated as programs like DEVONthink and ROAM Research. Over the last 10 years I have experimented with nearly a dozen approaches, but the last few have been fairly minor tweaks.
To reduce the wiki churn, I realized I needed a method which could be easily converted into any format in the future, was universally supported, and was relatively extensible. I tried out org-mode for a while, but even with Evil mode, I didn't enjoy spending time in emacs.
I completed what I hope to be my last wiki migration over the 2020 summer, switching to Markdown. It's simple, it's used everywhere, and it seems to be gaining ground in the personal wiki space rapidly. But leaving org-mode did have some shortfalls. It has amazing utilities for editing tables.
Building off of the excellent library started by susisu, I have been working on adding advanced features to tables in Markdown. With an editor that has this library incorporated (often possible though a plugin), Markdown tables become nearly as powerful as they are in org-mode. Automatic formatting, adding/moving/removing columns, sorting, and now even some spreadsheet capabilities are all possible in plain-text Markdown tables.
I hope this enables you to make the jump to a Markdown-based wiki.
I recommend Obsidian.