For example, there is Material Notes which has a editor toolbar with bold, indented, stroke, etc. But this is rendered, exported to json or syntax like Markdown. This app too, in which i write this on lemmy, does the same. We have ☐, ☒, •, ‣ in Unicode, 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱, 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵, so why not use this?
Basically, what i’m looking for is a text editor with toolbar/keystrokes for Android or Linux, which adds unicode symbols for rich text. It would make reading plain text notes/todo lists cross-device simpler. Yes, there’s UnicodePad and Charmap but that’s not the same.
edit: something where you mark a word, tap the B in the toolbar or press ctrl+b and it replaces the characters with uc bold characters, no? Tap the list button and it adds uc bullet points, etc…
Some applications can’t display some Unicode strings like s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵, so replacing Markdown element like
~strike~with Unicode equivalent (s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵ ) may not be a good idea if you want portability. I opened your post in text editors and noticed that neovim-qt drops s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵’s combining characters (issue on Github) and just displays stroke instead of s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵; GUI Emacs with my font settings (Noto) doesn’t combine the characters and displayss-t-r-o-k-e-(as I said, this may depends on font settings).Yeah, of course font an tool needs to support it. Well ok, maybe we’re not yet there. On the other hand, Emacs and Vim are quite old. It works in Kate, Mousepad, Leafpad… Nano does s-t-r-o-k-e too. Geany does a mix where it displays correctly but each char has two strokes, weird. But that is still good enough.
If you know Javascript you could very easily write a plugin in Obsidian to do this. Just have the plugin replace any markdown with the Unicode equivalent on save.
Great question though, it’s actually making me wonder why this isn’t a thing in normal plain text editors!
Because it’s not actually a good idea.
You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for “Bold”. You’ll see the example from OP doesn’t get picked up, because it’s not a B, it’s a 𝗕. And it’s not an o, it’s an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: “s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵”. Now, stroke isn’t a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it’s not stroke. It’s s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.
It’s also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won’t know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.
And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.
These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They’re stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.
This here is the best answer, i’d like to add:
Just use Markdown or Org-mode and then export to HTML. Most devices should have a browser capable of display this.
Great question though, it’s actually making me wonder why this isn’t a thing in normal plain text editors!
Right? Why make the text editor Unicode capable but not implement this? Are we too stuck in the xml ways?
This shouldn’t be too hard to implement in Emacs.
It already is:
C-x 8 RETOrg-mode mostly does this already. Just needs a shortcut to surround the marked area with the correct symbols.
Org-mode is splendid and i use it almost every day, but i think what op is asking for is something different. If i want to write something like this:
s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵
i would use
+stroke+in Org-mode. If i then setorg-hide-emphasis-markerstot, the+signs are hidden, but they are still there. If i save the file, and open it in another program, it is still+stroke+, instead of the unicode variant. The feature asked for was intended for the following use-case:It would make reading plain text notes/todo lists cross-device simpler.
Which Org-mode would fail to deliver on.
Export to latex (and to pdf)?
I doubt toolbars in a rich text editor specifically for Unicode symbols would be a thing, because…why?
There’s definitely VScode extensions that would show the glyphs or convert the actual unicode hex to whatever it should be.
I mean with rich text, text with bold, indent, etc., not a specific markup. On the contrary, i want to replace markup with native Unicode symbols.
You probably want a code editor then.
No.Ah, you meant implement it myself? Well, maybe in a few years, i have a gazilion other things to work on.
No, like VScode or similar. That’s probably where you’re going to find a feature like this.
Kate…?
s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵
Because it doesn’t look like
stroke.I’m trying to upload a picture of what it looks like on my phone but it won’t work. The lines don’t connect between characters. The line in the e seems to either be missing or not present at all. The k is barely visible and I didn’t notice it at first.
That said… I do with there was a way to do this easily in more programs without searching online for “Unicode font converter” to be able to get 𝖘𝖙𝖚𝖋𝖋 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘.
SublimeText with this plugin: https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath
Despite the name, it works for all Unicode characters :)
Ah damn, proprietary.
And looks like it only pastes? I make an edit.
Why not just use RTF documents?
