By rendering, I was referring to what browser was painting up the preview, which I assume, (as we are still in vscode), is Microsoft web-kit component. You saying that rather than using 11ty, it's using nextjs to parse the markdown and create the static react template that get hydated, (==> converted to html), and then passed on to the MS web-kit?

11ty is still generating the static files for

SitePreview

and site publishing, so V2 Preview is serving as a playground/testbed for the nextjs work I guess. Is there a timeline for slipping in nextjs?

yep, that's correct

we are actively developing the nextjs version - should have an alpha ready in a week or so 🙂

@User here's a super rough preview: https://www.loom.com/share/75ae740fb48e48b4954870bc8a589a6c

cool, still looking to generate my own nav pane for making note on books, waiting for the nextjs stuff to drop

Kevin, I have been doing info management systems all my life. including a 35K line behemoth written in Java. So I love and salute what you are doing. Here is my present understanding of why your stuff as it stands might not be able to serve my needs in the moment.

Presently I have several thousands .md files locally on my Mac, and I use the FoldingText editor to edit and view them. This is WYSIWYG editing that lets me have a pretty picture of my info notes, and lets me edit them in the same single pane. (which is superior to the read-only pane I get from Dendron... still this does not yet kill Dendron for me). For me the 500 pound gorilla is the ability to FOLD text. As you know, trees are just a great way to organize butt loads of info. As I work I tend to fold most of a doc down, but then leave several sections expanded where I am working.

This works well in VScode / Dendron. But ONLY in the edit view. The 'pretty' view is always expanded, so it is useless if one has lots of text that needs to be elided. but that is ok. If I get the functionality I need, then I can live with the ugliness of the VS editor (compared with the clean look of folding text).

But here is where we get our trouble. If one starts tying to use the edit mode in VScode as the ONLY view one uses for ones info, then the links in the EDIT view really become problematic. They are freaking huge, and one sees the whole link. In folding text one only sees the whole link when putting your cursor INSIDE the link region of the URL. This means in practice with folding text, in a single interface I get:

- section folding

- editing

- clean looking links

If I understand correctly, given the present design of Dendron, I cannot have those three things at the same time?

If that is true, Dendron cannot be my primary editor. It is possible I would have my .md files edited via both, and would jump into Dendron in rare cases where I want to find something, or otherwise do things that span many .md files. (which basically does not work with folding text.)

In any case, I wanted to leave detailed feedback. I hope you guys change the world.... I love the mission! cheers, dan

(If there is some way, even a hacky way, that I can achieve all three of those requirements above within Dendon, as it exists today, then I am very interested in playing around with it. Please let me know!)

This doesn't do anything about how links appear in the edit view, but I thought you might be interested in the Auto-fold extension if you haven't already encountered it. It lets you set automatic folding to a particular heading or indentation level in a few different ways: https://github.com/bobmagicii/vscode-auto-fold

Appreciate the link! But I exited and re-entered, and it appeared that VScode was remembering the folding state of each level within a file (thank God!). So that part seemed to work... as far as I could see. It was just that I was forced to use the editor if I wanted folding, but then in the editor, I see no way to have reasonable looking link structures. thanks for the pointer. It seems almost no environment gets folding correct. (emacs org mode gets it right.. and so does Microsoft One Note, but they are the rare exceptions!). thanks.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. some thoughts here: - we do have plans to explore a WYSIWYG editor and slowly transform the preview pane from one that is read only to one that comes with editing support. probably late 2021 or early 2022 timeline roughly - for folding, this is partially supported via the

<summary>

syntax, see [here](https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/ba97866b-889f-4ac6-86e7-bb2d97f6e376.html#folding) - its not ideal but in case its helpful - for edit mode links, unfortunately this isn't something that can be done in vscode at the time, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50840

I totally sympathize—I used to be continually frustrated with the Taskpaper and FoldingText apps because they did things almost exactly how I wanted, with a couple glaring non-configurable differences. Have you tried [Zettlr](https://www.zettlr.com/) already? It does section folding (by heading but not by indentation from what I can tell), you can edit in the pretty / rendered view, and you can have links display just the link text, not the full path. The turn on that last feature, you just have to go into Zettlr's app preferences, go to the "Display" menu, and then turn on "render links." Then you could use VSCode to navigate notes and use an extension like [Open in Application](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fabiospampinato.vscode-open-in-application) for actually editing them? That wouldn't be ideal, but it might smooth off the rough edges for your experience at least.

@User yeah, editing in the view pane is the ultimate win, but it will be hard. Especially since (for me) if you lost the folding nature provided by VScode, it would be totally unusable. Another idea is to think of Dendron as providing capabilities into an ecosystem of markdown apps. People could use external markdown viewers/editors (since there are many with different features). And your slice in that ecosystem is the blazing fast indexing and version control over those files. you would have a thin popup that gave us the dendron search etc capabilities on the current .MD file.

In that vein it seems pretty valuable for the meta data for a markdown file to not be stored IN the file. It is kinda gross to have meta data jammed into the top of every markdown. A trival alternative would be to put it at the end of the file. But instead it could go in a stand aside database (where I suspect you already have meta data)

I could even imagine an command line that provides many file level capabilties.... and of course if you do replicate all the WYSIWYG goodness of others, then that works too.

For me, versioning, fast search, flexible linking are all features that can be decoupled from the core editing.... just a thought. thanks!

@User Thanks!! I checked it out. It is a near miss (as so many are!). For me with large structures, I really desperately require folding MEMORY. Going back into a large document only to find 300 tabs all expanded out, is just not workable. The Mac App called FoldingText really nails this use case well. I might try the VScode open app approach. But if Dendron edits the header of the file, it will cause folding text to "forget" all fold settings. If that happened rarely it would be ok, but it looks like Dendron is putting modification time and such up there. So it might really be a problem. Folding is SO important for me, I am surprised that it is not critical for most others too.... but based on its hit-or-miss inclusion into most note taking tools, I must be in the minority somehow. (I think they are missing out! 🙂 ). Thanks much!

Hello @here! It's CROP time 🙂 Please vote for your favored crop 👨‍🌾👩‍🌾 1. [Rename Header command](https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron/issues/370) 2. [Wipe cache command](https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron/issues/839) 3. [Prompt User When Using Delete Node](https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron/issues/963) 4. None of these (if there's an issue you'd like to add to rotation, please reply with a github issue) To vote, respond with a 1️⃣ 2️⃣ 3️⃣ or 4️⃣ to this message. voting closes tomorrow

Raising a 🖐️ for this issue, if possible. I'd love to see it get some love, as this relative referencing fits my workflow very well. https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron/issues/509

@User in v53 the graph hides the labels too early on zoom out. i can only see them in a small fragment of the graph. is this a controllable setting? eg, in this examples the labels would be readable but none are shown and the 'Show Labels' button does nothing.

is it possible to have the preview provide syntax highlight to code blocks?