Subtext: markup for note-taking
This week’s update is little bit different. Instead of sharing the ideas behind Subconscious, I want to share some work in progress.
While building Subconscious, I’ve been experimenting with a simple markup language for plain text notes. I’m calling it Subtext.
Here’s a speculative specification for Subtext. This is a rough sketch, and the language design is just a hypothesis! I want to live with Subtext, and experiment with the kinds of tools you can build on top of it, before committing to anything. Subtext might undergo radical breaking change! This is work in progress, and shared in the spirit of working with the garage door open.
Subtext is line-oriented. Each line in the file is treated as a discrete block of content. The type of a line is determined by a sigil character, like #, &, >, at the front of the line. If a line doesn’t have a sigil character, it is treated as plain text. This makes Subtext very easy to parse, and very easy to write. It is currently impossible to write broken Subtext, which is nice!
Today the book is already… an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. - Walter Benjamin
