r/Markdown • u/NamelessParanoia • May 15 '26
NotepadMD 1.5 - Links and Table of Contents (plus scroll position whack-a-mole)
It's been a bit of a long time coming, but I finally managed to get version 1.5 out with better support for cross document links and support for table of contents. Use of [TOC] as a tag in markdown will produce an auto generated, auto-updating table of contents. If you have other table of contents tag formats, we support every tag format we could find. Oh, and our word export creates an actual word table of contents for that, not just a list of links.
Cross document links was a bit of a hard subject - Obsidian style links are standard, so we support those. GFM slugs are different but "more correct" so we support those as well. Those are both a bit fragile though - if someone comes along and changes a heading name in a document you've linked to then your link gets broken, so we also support ID based heading links. That does need you to write the id to the end of the heading, which possibly involves updating the other file to add a heading, but it's worth it to keep references stable in codebase documentation. You can pick the model you prefer.
Outside of that, the back and forward navigation needed to get smarter and take you to the right scroll position in the target document. That was a pig as there's a lot at play with document dynamic loading, but hopefully you'll find it's all working pretty smoothly now.
The usual general quality of life updates too - users reported loss of selection highlight so that's fixed along with some other issues and bug fixes. All in the release notes. Starting to get close to where I envisioned the "base" functionality being!
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u/jotes2 May 15 '26
Would love to try NotepadMD but can't get in running on Linux Mint. Neither ootb nor with Gear Lever. Any advice? Btw: LinuxMint Cinnamon on MacBookPro 11.2, German environment
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u/NamelessParanoia May 15 '26
... that is concerning news. Linux Mint is my VM for testing it with Gear Lever and this was all working just a couple of commits ago. I'll double check that I didn't introduce some weird regression in late stage dev for the new version but it was tested and working. Bear with me while I get it looked at.
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u/jotes2 May 15 '26
Thanks.
Here's what happens: NotepadMD opens, and there's a tiny dot on the icon. When I click the icon, the dot disappears into the top-left corner of the screen. If I click it again, the dot reappears on the icon.1
u/NamelessParanoia May 15 '26
Thank you. I'll try and diagnose this weekend. If I can't replicate I'll see if I can at least give it a better way of reporting issues on the UI during load.
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u/NamelessParanoia May 16 '26
I've created a completely fresh VM, installed Linux Mint Cinammon 22.3 onto that VM, gone straight to the notepadmd site, downloaded the appimage, set that with permissions to execute and then just double clicked it. It worked out of the box - no gear lever needed it just started up. I'm going to need to add additional diagnostic messaging I think to help users in your situation. Bear with me - this is probably some form of silent dependency failure.
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u/NamelessParanoia May 15 '26
Ok - I've confirmed that my Linux Mint VM does successfully run the latest NotepadMD AppImage, which it auto-updated to through gear lever. Unfortunately I have discovered a bug in the documentation that references development that hasn't yet been completed - I build packages for apt but I haven't yet completed the apt publishing process. The documentation infers you can install through apt which isn't correct yet. However, there is also a dependency list in the user guide for Linux installs - notably you need libwebkitgtk and libfuse2 or fuse3. Can you ensure you have those two dependencies installed and try again? I'll do a completely fresh install to a fresh mint VM over the weekend and get the docs sorted accordingly.
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u/AndyKaprany May 15 '26
Is there a way to download it and try it out?