Background: I’m switching from OneNote to Joplin - started migration this week, so I’m quite “fresh” to Joplin. OTOH I’m familiar with Markdown as I’m using it at work. I’ve used “OneNote Md Exporter” for conversion (about 500 notes). It’s mostly text with some tables and images.
By default Joplin does not use soft breaks: the option is disabled, when you enter two lines they are rendered as two lines, also the exporter I used generates markdown that relies on this (no two spaces or backslash at end of line).
So I’ve started thinking about compatibility. Soft breaks are the standard/default behavior for Markdown, as far as I know. What if at some point I want to migrate from Joplin to some other application, or want to use the notes outside of Joplin? It will render completely different than in Joplin, most likely it’ll be not very readable at least.
At the same time, I’m not sure I want to enable soft breaks. I think they make it harder to edit notes/enter text. Especially on smartphones.
What do you think about this? Have you considered this problem? Or maybe you don’t care? Never had a problem with this? Other apps can be configured to disable soft breaks? You enabled soft breaks and write in “standard” markdown? Please let me know what’s your experience with this.
I would recommend against using soft breaks mostly for the reasons you mentioned. I feel this is an artifact from an old time, when terminals were 80 characters long and doesn't have much relevance today. Where a line should break should be decided by the application and we have a number of options to configure rendering (there's an option to set the text width for example)
But also I would suggest using the app built-in OneNote importer as I suspect it's one of the better ones out there giving how much work went into it, and we've added many fixes for better compatibility in recent versions
I guess you’re right - for people that take notes on smartphones, tablets and home computers it makes no sense to keep a line length limit.
Might be different depending on the field of use (e.g. it’s common in software development).
I’m only concerned about compatibility / moving to different application / exporting notes. If the other application does not support changing the default behavior, the notes will be unreadable. Or there will be a need for additional post-processing/conversion during export or import.
I tried it first, but unfortunately it was not working well. I even considered not using Joplin because the exported/imported notes were not usable. The MD Exporter wasn’t perfect, but so far only a few notes with complex tables will need heavy fixes (they were exported as HTML tables - guess markdown can’t really express things like lists inside table cells…)
Soft breaks are more logical to me. Both on desktop and on mobile. But maybe I am simply anachronistic. To me, Markdown and Markdown, and soft breaks is Markdown. Do other implementations utilize hard breaks as the default? I wouldn't think so, but maybe I am wrong. Comment widgets like this think do. I use Joplin more for documents than notes, so maybe that is the mental shift that makes it make more sense for me. Anyway. My brain has been wired to hit two spaces and return when I want to express that hardbreak. I have simply gotten used it. Markdown has been my primary mode of documenting for many years now.
A bit off topic, but I think this is a broken feature. Two spaces are invisible in most editors, plus some editors remove trailing spaces. It’s easy to add spaces at the end of line by mistake. I think it’d be better if there was no such feature in Markdown. (Note that there’s also a backslash that does the same and I’m OK with it)