In the process of moving all of my notes from one app to another, a blog post for another day, and the biggest pain point so far has been editing Markdown tables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The app I am going from has a lot of tables, and the app I am going to does everything in Markdown (light weight formatting for plain text files but gives p enough bells and whistles for things like notes and scraping webpages). The problem is the old app includes a bunch of things in the tables like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which I really don’t need in the new app, or at least don’t need in the table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tables in Markdown are formatted like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
|Name|Tags|URL|Created Date|\n|---|---|---|---|\n|some name|some tag|some url|some date|<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nWhich is pretty cool. Tables that are mostly readable in text or rendered as Markdown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Problem is when you want to remove a column. I cannot find an editor or plugin that allows for manipulation of the table like that. Which means to remove a column, especially more than one column or a column in the middle, you have to get creative or do it all by hand (ugh).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I ended up trying to get creative and went down the regular expressions route. Though I have to eventually end up in Visual Studio, since VS.code doesn’t support replacing named capture groups (why have capture groups if you cannot use them for replace?) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only other thing I thought of was to open Sheets\/Excel and import the table, edit it, and then re-export it. No idea if either do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lack of ability to edit tables is a pretty bad experience. Little surprised, given how ubiquitous Markdown has become that there is not another solution for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I guess it is not really Markdown tables that suck. They do their job pretty well. Updating them is a pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
-luke
Boston, MA
2023.08.21<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the process of moving all of my notes from one app to another, a blog post for another day, and the biggest pain point so far has been editing Markdown tables.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"everybody","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":true},"categories":[3,585],"tags":[289,582,584],"class_list":["post-42667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-notes","tag-markdown","tag-notes-migration-2023","tag-regex"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1AdCf-b6b","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":44063,"url":"https:\/\/technology-hates-you.com\/lm3m\/44063","url_meta":{"origin":42667,"position":0},"title":"a public commonplace book","author":"lm3m","date":"2024.02.26 at 07:35 AM","format":false,"excerpt":"I have always loved the idea of commonplace books, a writers sketch book, more or less. Digital versions in things like tickler files have tempted me down the path into many failed or abandoned organizational systems. I have tried to keep physical ones, digital ones, even have a magical one\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "blog"","block_context":{"text":"blog","link":"https:\/\/technology-hates-you.com\/lm3m\/category\/blog"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":681,"url":"https:\/\/technology-hates-you.com\/lm3m\/681","url_meta":{"origin":42667,"position":1},"title":"Weapons of Choice 2012","author":"lm3m","date":"2012.08.30 at 09:58 AM","format":false,"excerpt":"Software Scrivener(http:\/\/www.literatureandlatte.com\/scrivener.php): For actual writing, manipulation, etc. It is an IDE for writers, for all you dorks out there. For you non-dorks, it lets you write you work in logical chunks and then manipulate it into shape before rendering it to a manuscript. 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