Plugin: Highlighter

[Dave]

This is my first attempt at a Joplin plugin.

The plugin allows the user to auto insert the MARK or a SPAN tag containing a number of pre-selected background text colours.

The JPL package is downloadable from Github - JoplinDave/joplin-plugin-highlighter: Highlighter plugin for the note taking app Joplin (github.com)

Please see the ReadMe on Github for full instructions.

Thanks to CalebJohn for resolving an issue with this plugin for me, and the suggestion of v2 of the plugin that wouldn't immediately insert the tags, but dynamically render the highlights upon viewing the note.

[whitewall]

Congratulations! Thanks for all your work.

This looks great. Is there any chance of having the highlighting applied in the markdown editor? I'm happy to use just the ==built in markup== but since I do most of my work in the raw markdown, I don't use this since it doesn't highlight things there.

[skim1124]

Thanks for this. But with a customized dark theme, the highlight makes the text hard to read because the text is in white. It'd be much more readable if the text were black, which is what I get if I use the ==text== option.

[skim1124]

I just discovered that using "m" instead of one of the colors gives me the same effect as ==text== (that is, black text and yellow highlight). But it'd be nice if there could be black text even with red, blue, and green highlighting.

[ajay]

Nice plug-in, good idea !
but let me ask: how complicated is it to replace typing "un-human" mark-up commands in two places (beginning and end) into a simple mouse command added to the context menu ? Such as:
select text -> right-lick -> menu item "highlights" -> select the highlight you want
This would turn a nice plug-in into a great plug-in

[aaronxn]

This plugin has a lot of potential. I'm going to use it and follow its development.

Feature Request: I would like to highlight more than one item in each category (one word, one sentence, etc.). Could we add a count option to highlight up to said count? TWO words, THREE sentences, etc.?

Also, a paragraph selector would be nice. It could easily be worked into the sentence selector, I.e. find the double new line, or

. Could also have an option to not select beyond the current paragraph (all these ideas rotate around finding the end of the current paragraph).

Again, thank you for this plugin!

[Dave]

Thanks for the feedback to date.

I had not considered how the highlights would look on if you are using a dark theme. I will consider this in the next release.

The plugin deliberately doesn't use menus, mouse or popup as keyboard entry is much faster and more efficient, but I can understand why people would like it. The difficulty with using the mouse is that there would have to be a number of options to decide which colour should be used.

The plugin was designed with the thought that the number of words/sentences/lines could be extended by the simple use of a number after the 'scope' parameter i.e. [h:y:w4]

[mzguy]

I think an ideal enhancement that solves many issues at once is to add as an option a button in the markdown editor the reveals a menu of color options. Upon selecting the color, any text that was highlighted in the editor will then receive that color. A user can then select any custom text in the editor, tap the bottom, pick a color, done.

This allows for more flexibility (though it requires mouse use), but avoids a ton of customization (paragraphs, number of words, etc. There is a time and place for mouse use, and I think this is one of them). It also avoids awkward use cases where one would otherwise have to count words to determine how many to highlight, for example.

Keeping the text-based options is fine though, to handle the common use cases.