Welcome to the lab.

Here’s another short video for SearchLink.

The better your search, the better your results. You’re a web professional, you know how to Google, so put your query-crafting skills to use to harness the convenience of SearchLink. By adding the right keywords to a search, you’re guaranteed to get the link you were hoping for without leaving your editor.

Find out more about SearchLink on the project page, and check out the wiki for all of the documentation.

I made you a video with some SearchLink tips. Note that I’m using SearchLink 2.3.15+ in these videos.

First up, how would you like to be able to instantly access any page you’ve visited in any browser? Or be able to instantly recall pages you’ve bookmarked in your browser or on Pinboard? Here you go:

As always, find out more about SearchLink on the project page, and check out the wiki for all of the documentation.

The latest version of Marked 2, 2.6.18, is released for direct customers and in review for Setapp and Mac App Store customers. It has two things that I think will be of interest to many.

Too much coffee? Not enough?

First, I finally figured out a way to stop the Table of Contents and other fixed-position elements from jittering when the preview scrolls. That started with the last OS as a result of new rubber-banding in web views. I could set the body to fixed position and scroll the containing div, but that broke all of the positioning that Marked needs to do for things like bookmarking and header navigation. After months of experimenting, I decided, just for giggles, to try other positioning values on the body element. Eventually found that temporarily setting it to sticky would stop the jitter and not break my ability to get document-relative positions. In my testing I haven’t found any notable repercussions to this, so I’m releasing it. Using Marked is significantly better now, what without elements jumping around and such.

Mermaid users will love this…

Second, over the last couple of years, many users have run into complications when embedding their own scripts. It used to be that every time the preview updated, Marked did a full page load, which would then run scripts triggered by onload. But a few versions back I modified the page load such that new content is injected into the container div without requiring a reload. This was a major step forward in usability, but it meant that those custom scripts wouldn’t trigger again after the initial load. So I worked up a solution that allows you to “hook” the update function, triggering any function whenever the preview updates. It’s a simple script block you can embed along with your custom script, e.g. Mermaid. If you use it on every document, you can injected the scripts with a custom preprocessor. See Embedding Scripts for details on Marked.hooks.

A few other fixes showed up in this release as well. Visit the changelog for a full list.

I’ve updated the Comment Flags Service to handle long options. Comment Flags takes a terminal command and adds markup so you can comment on each flag/switch in the command for the purposes of documentation:

The previous version of this Service could only handle short options, like -d or combined short options like -ltR. It ignored long options like --format=markdown because I assumed that long options were verbose enough to make sense. I recently changed my mind on that, so now the Service includes comment markers for long options as well.

Here’s a quick video of running the Service in TextBuddy.

(Aside: to run macOS Services in TextBuddy, you need to run a little defaults write command in Terminal.. Also, I don’t know why my Services are showing up twice, as seen in the video, right now. Mysterious.)

Hope this is of use to those writing about terminal commands or documenting their own tools!