SN Indent Editor

A Useable SN Plain Text Editor

The Indent Editor is a relatively recent (initial commit Jan 2020) and easily installed editor for Standard Notes. Think of it as another plain text editor upgraded with sensible indentation and prefix behaviour:

• continuation of indentation level when wrapping text.
• preservation of current indentation and prefix characters (- * > +) when hitting enter.
• increase indent of current line (or selected lines) by two spaces by hitting tab.
• decrease indent of current line (or selected lines) by two spaces by hitting shift-tab.
• move current line (or selected lines) up or down by hitting ctrl-shift-up or ctrl-shift-down respectively.
• duplicate current line (or selected lines) with ctrl-d.

Just a few functional features, but they make creating / editing notes with nested lists much more convenient, and well worth investigating. But wait ... that's not all ... while the Indent Editor is by no means a markdown editor, it does offer a few stylistic niceties up its sleeve:

• headings: three levels of headings for lines beginning with 1 - 3 # characters are styled with larger bold text (in actuality, the headings can also be preceded by indentation/prefix characters in the editor and still be styled as such, but that won't transfer if you send your text through a markdown processor).
• links: anything that looks like a web address will be highlighted/underlined and the link can be opened in a browser tab with a ctrl-click.
• code: backticks can be used inline to denote code/commands/etc. Triple backticks can be used for "code fenced" blocks with some caveats:
  • the initiating backticks must be the last thing on the line (you can't add a language name, which limits the useability for actual code blocks intended for markdown processing, but one can always use tilde-delimited code blocks and just have no styling in the Indent Editor).
  • there is no syntax highlighting or anything in such a code block, all text is styled just like within single backticks.
• blank lines have a reduced line height, and lines that wrap have slightly reduced inter-line spacing providing a more compact but visually organized appearance.

I do most of my writing utilizing markdown markup, and have actually tried out most of the markdown editors available for Standard Notes. In the end, I uninstalled all of them in preference for the Indent Editor (actually, a version I tweaked slightly for heading colors). When I want to write longer form, or edit my SN notes with a markdown editor, I use the standardnotes-fs tool to have my SN notes repository mounted on my drive and just open that directory with Typora (edits are synced back to the server). But for a fast, useable, note editor, the Indent-Editor gets my vote ... and here is my tweaked version editing this note:

(SN Web platform with Slate theme and Indent Editor)