Wish you could keep everything associated with your writing in one easy-to-access place that’s portable and searchable?
Consider giving Scrivener a try. Scrivener is writing software—with versions for both Mac and Windows—that’s customizable to the way you work.
When a friend recommended Scrivener to me several years ago, I wondered what it could possibly do that my standard word processor couldn’t. Boy, was I shocked! Happily so. I bought the software immediately and haven’t looked back.
Unlike a word processor that only allows you to create one document for each piece of writing—and forces you to write linearly—Scrivener can hold multiple documents within a project. Each document can be a scene, section, chapter, blog post, magazine article, or journal entry. The documents are easy to move, categorize, search, save versions of, and edit.
And because you’re working in “chunks” you don’t have to write in order. Mind boggling, right?
The documents can be organized into folders, and the whole structure—a sort of outline view—of your project is visible in a sidebar called the Binder.
And there’s so much more. Here are a few ways Scrivener can help you power through your writing while keeping everything you need right at your fingertips.
Divide up your work
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a novel, short story, magazine article, speech, academic paper or blog post. In Scrivener, you can break your work into as many pieces (i.e. documents) as you desire.
Why would you want to?
Say you’ve chosen five main points for your article, but you haven’t yet decided on the correct order for them. No problem. Create a document for each point, write the content, and then you can move them around—on the Corkboard, Outliner, or in the Binder—until you find an order you like.
You can then view and edit the documents in the Editor as one continuous piece to make sure the finished product makes sense.
The same approach can work for scenes in a novel, sections of a dissertation, or chapters of a memoir, or anything else.
Working in smaller pieces frees you up to write in whatever order the ideas come to you and then play with them until you have a coherent work that flows.
Plot or Not
Whether you plot out your work in advance, or just sit down and start writing, Scrivener can work for you. Plotters will love the ability to create placeholder documents for each scene and then view and move them as I mentioned above.
Pantsers, those who write by the seat of their pants, don’t fret. You can just open a new document and start writing until you hit the end of a scene or chapter, then create a new document and keep going. Anytime along the way, you can use the Corkboard or Outliner to ensure your story flow makes sense and to look for holes in your manuscript’s structure.
I fall somewhere in between the two writing styles, so I hash out a rough outline as a guide, then create a document for each new scene as I write it. After I’ve gone through the major revisions, and feel that the core storyline won’t change, I group the scene documents into chapter folders.
The beauty of Scrivener? The software is flexible enough to accommodate any writer’s process.
Corral your research and notes
In addition to the words you write, a Scrivener project can contain research documents and web sites (or links to them), reference photos, and your notes and outlines.
Having your supporting material all in one place means you can find it quickly, and you have it with you when you take your writing on the road.
If you get a brilliant idea for future article, blog post, scene, or piece of dialogue while you’re in the middle of writing, just jot it down in the Notes section—or create a placeholder document—and then get back to writing.
Tag your documents to stay organized
Customizable meta-data fields allow you to tag and visually track whatever you want about a document within a project.
For example, I’m an author for more than one blog, so I label blog posts by web site. In novels, I like to see the point-of-view character for each scene or the day of the week. When I wrote Scrivener For Dummies, I kept track of the revision status of each chapter.
Other things you might keep note of include theme, submission status, setting, storyline or topic. And with color-coding, you can quickly see the Label value of each document in the Binder, Corkboard, or Outliner.
Hit your target
Need to write a 70,000-word book? Set a project target. Want to get in your 1000 words each day? A session target will keep you on track. Writing an article that needs to be 1200 words? Create a document target.
Each of the target types provides a colorful progress bar that changes from red to green as your word count advances toward the goal. And you can set up notifications to alert you when you hit your target.
Don’t stop writing
When you’re in the groove and the words are flying, don’t let the need for that perfect word, piece of dialogue, or research fact slow you down. Insert an annotation or comment to remind you, and get back to writing.
You can easily find and address the problem spot later when you’re ready to work on revisions.
Block out distractions
The Scrivener screen is busy, email catches your eye, notifications keep popping up, and someone wants to chat. Hide it all with full screen composition mode.
Modify the background to a color or image that puts you in the mood for what you’re working on and stay focused until you meet your word count goal.
Protect your words
If you write long enough, something will go wrong. You’ll drop your laptop, spill water on your keyboard, have a failed hard drive, or lose power in the middle of writing. Scrivener makes it easy to protect your hard work when disaster strikes.
First, Scrivener automatically saves your project every time there’s no activity for two seconds. So, whenever you pause to think about your next line, Scrivener is saving.
You can also configure Scrivener to back up your project file to any location, and choose to automatically back up on project close, project open, or manual save.
Finally, you can save a version of any document within your project using the Snapshots feature. Before you start revising a scene, blog post, article or chapter, take a snapshot. The saved version is stored with the document so you can refer back to what you wrote, copy text from a previous version, and even revert to an earlier version, if desired.
One-stop self-publishing
Whether you want to self-publish, or just read your work on an e-reader, Scrivener makes it easy to convert your project to an EPUB or MOBI (Amazon Kindle) file. No extra software required!
In fact, you can write in any font, size, and style you want, because Scrivener will convert it to the format you choose when you export (called compiling).
Just choose your output format, file type, and which parts of the project to include. Scrivener compiles the documents you choose into one output file.
In addition to e-book formats, you can export to DOC, RTF, PDF, TXT, direct-to-printer, and more.
Try it for free
Scrivener has a free 30-use trial, so there’s no excuse not to give it a try. It might just be the best thing you ever do for your writing career.
About the author
Gwen Hernandez is the author of Scrivener For Dummies, and teacher of popular online courses on Scrivener for Mac and Windows. Find her online at www.gwenhernandez.com.
I use Alfred for my launch / search and nvALT for my markdown notes. This is a great addition to bring the two together.
I’ve had several people report that the nvALT Tag Search workflow for Alfred 2 hasn’t been working for them. I just updated the download with version 1.1. It removes some of the criteria for the file filter and hopefully generalizes the search enough to work for more people.
Please be sure to open the workflow and double-click the File Filter input in the workflow. Under Search Scope you need to make sure it points to the folder where you store your text files. Related: you have to have your database stored as text files.
Hope this helps, it’s a really handy tool when it works.
Update: I just uploaded version 1.2, which fixes the “.ext” appearing in non-“md” file searches. It should work with any extension now.
I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford.
They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition.
Connecting brains
My first question to the group had to do with the technological requirements. How is it, exactly, that we’re going to connect our minds over the Internet, or some future manifestation of it?
“I really think we have sufficient hardware available now — tools like Braingate,” says Warwick. “But we have a lot to learn with regard to how much the brain can adapt, just how many implants would be required, and where they would need to be positioned.”
Naam agrees that we’re largely on our way. He says we already have the basics of sending some sorts of information in and out of the brain. In humans, we’ve done it with video, audio, and motor control. In principle, nothing prevents us from sending that data back and forth between people.
“Practically speaking, though, there are some big things we have to do,” he tells io9. “First, we have to increase the bandwidth. The most sophisticated systems we have right now use about 100 electrodes, while the brain has more than 100 billion neurons. If you want to get good fidelity on the stuff you’re beaming back and forth between people, you’re going to want to get on the order of millions of electrodes.”
Naam says we can build the electronics for that easily, but building it in such a way that the brain accepts it is a major challenge.
The second hurdle, he says, is going beyond sensory and motor control.
“If you want to beam speech between people, you can probably tap into that with some extensions of what we’ve already been doing, though it will certainly involve researchers specifically working on decoding that kind of data,” he says. “But if you want to go beyond sending speech and get into full blown sharing of experiences, emotions, memories, or even skills (a la The Matrix), then you’re wandering into unknown territory.”
Indeed, Sandberg says that picking up and translating brain signals will be a tricky matter.
“EEG sensors have lousy resolution — we get an average of millions of neurons, plus electrical noise from muscles and the surroundings,” he says. “Subvocalisation and detecting muscle twitches is easier to do, although they will still be fairly noisy. Internal brain electrodes exist and can get a lot of data from a small region, but this of course requires brain surgery. I am having great hopes for optogenetics and nanofibers for making kinder, gentler implants that are less risky to insert and easier on their tissue surroundings.”
The real problem, he says, is translating signals in a sensible way. “Your brain representation of the concept "mountain" is different from mine, the result not just of different experiences, but also on account of my different neurons. So, if I wanted to activate the mountain concept, I would need to activate a disperse, perhaps very complex network across your brain,” he tells io9. “That would require some translation that figured out that I wanted to suggest a mountain, and found which pattern is your mountain.”
Sandberg says we normally "cheat" by learning a convenient code called language, where all the mapping between the code and our neural activations is learned as we grow. We can, of course, learn new codes as adults, and this is rarely a problem — adults already master things like Morse code, SMS abbreviations, or subtle signs of gesture and style. Sandberg points to the recent experiments by Nicolelis connecting brains directly, research which shows that it might be possible to get rodents to learn neural codes. But he says this learning is cumbersome, and we should be able to come up with something simpler.
One way is to boost learning. Some research shows that amphetamine and presumably other learning stimulants can speed up language learning. Recent work on the Nogo Receptor suggests that brain plasticity can be turned on and off. “So maybe we can use this to learn quickly,” says Sandberg.
Another way is to have software do the translation. It is not hard to imagine machine learning to figure out what neural codes or mumbled keywords correspond to which signal — but setting up the training so that users find it acceptably fast is another matter.
“So my guess is that if pairs of people really wanted to ‘get to know each other’ and devoted a lot of time and effort, they could likely learn signals and build translation protocols that would allow a lot of ‘telepathic’ communication — but it would be very specific to them, like the ‘internal language’ some couples have,” says Sandberg. “For the weaker social links, where we do not want to spend months learning how to speak to each other, we would rely on automatically translated signals. A lot of it would be standard things like voice and text, but one could imagine adding supporting ‘subtitles’ showing graphics or activating some neural assemblies.”
Bridging the gap
In terms of the communications backbone, Sandberg believes it’s largely in place, but it will likely have to be extended much further.
“The theoretical bandwidth limitations of even a wireless Internet are far, far beyond the bandwidth limitations of our brains — tens of terabits per second,” he told me, “and there are orbital angular momentum methods that might get far more.”
Take the corpus callosum, for example. It has around 250 million axons, and even at the maximal neural firing rate of just 25 gigabits, that should be enough to keep the hemispheres connected such that we feel we are a single mind.
As for the interface, Warwick says we should stick to implanted multi-electrode arrays. These may someday become wireless, but they’ll have to remain wired until we learn more about the process. Like Sandberg, he adds that we’ll also need to develop adaptive software interfacing.
Naam envisions something laced throughout the brain, coupled with some device that could be worn on the person’s body.
“For the first part, you can imagine a mesh of nano-scale sensors either inserted through a tiny hole in the skull, or somehow through the brain’s blood vessels. In Nexus I imagined a variant on this — tiny nano-particles that are small enough that they can be swallowed and will then cross the blood-brain barrier and find their way to neurons in the brain.”
Realistically, Naam says that whatever we insert in the brain is going to be pretty low energy consumption. The implant, or mesh, or nano-particles could communicate wirelessly, but to boost their signal — and to provide them power — scientists will have to pair them with something the person wears, like a cap, a pair of glasses, a headband — anything that can be worn very near the brain so it can pick up those weak signals and boost them, including signals from the outside world that will be channeled into the brain.
How soon before the hive mind?
Warwick believes that the technologies required to build an early version of the telepathic noosphere are largely in place. All that’s required, he says, is “money on the table” and the proper ethical approval.
Sandberg concurs, saying that we’re already doing it with cellphones. He points to the work of Charles Stross, who suggests that the next generation will never have to be alone, get lost, or forget anything.
“As soon as people have persistent wearable systems that can pick up their speech, I think we can do a crude version,” says Sandberg. “Having a system that’s on all the time will allow us to get a lot of data — and it better be unobtrusive. I would not be surprised to see experiments with Google Glasses before the end of the year, but we’ll probably end up saying it’s just a fancy way of using cellphones.”
At the same time, Sandberg suspects that “real” neural interfacing will take a while, since it needs to be safe, convenient, and have a killer app worth doing. It will also have to compete with existing communications systems and their apps.
Similarly, Naam says we could build a telepathic network in a few years, but with “very, very, low fidelity.” But that low fidelity, he says, would be considerably worse than the quality we get by using phones — or even text or IM. “I doubt anyone who’s currently healthy would want to use it.”
But for a really stable, high bandwidth system in and out of the brain, that could take upwards of 15 to 20 years, which Naam concedes is optimistic.
“In any case, it’s not a huge priority,” he says. “And it’s not one where we’re willing to cut corners today. It’s firmly in the medical sphere, and the first rule there is ‘do no harm’. That means that science is done extremely cautiously, with the priority overwhelmingly — and appropriately — being not to harm the human subject.”
Nearly supernatural
I asked Sandberg how the telepathic noosphere will disrupt the various way humans engage in work and social relations.
“Any enhancement of communication ability is a big deal,” he responded. “We humans are dominant because we are so good at communication and coordination, and any improvement would likely boost that. Just consider flash mobs or how online ARG communities do things that seem nearly supernatural.”
Cell phones, he says, made our schedules flexible in time and space, allowing us to coordinate where to meet on the fly. He says we’re also adding various non-human services like apps and Siri-like agents. “Our communications systems are allowing us to interact not just with each other but with various artificial agents,” he says. Messages can be stored, translated and integrated with other messages.
“If we become telepathic, it means we will have ways of doing the same with concepts, ideas and sensory signals,” says Sandberg. “It is hard to predict just what this will be used for since there are so few limitations. But just consider the possibility of getting instruction and skills via augmented reality and well designed sensory/motor interfaces. A team might help a member perform actions while ‘looking over her shoulder’, as if she knew all they knew. And if the system is general enough, it means that you could in principle get help from any skilled person anywhere in the world.”
In response to the same question, Naam noted that communication boosts can accelerate technical innovation, but more importantly, they can also accelerate the spread of any kind of idea. “And that can be hugely disruptive,” he says.
But in terms of the possibilities, Naam says the sky’s the limit.
“With all of those components, you can imagine people doing all sorts of things with such an interface. You could play games together. You could enter virtual worlds together,” he says. “Designers or architects or artists could imagine designs and share them mentally with others. You could work together on any type of project where you can see or hear what you’re doing. And of course, sex has driven a lot of information technologies forward — with sight, sound, touch, and motor control, you could imagine new forms of virtual sex or virtual pornography.”
Warwick imagines communication in the broadest sense, including the technically-enabled telepathic transmission of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and emotions. “I also think this communication will be far richer when compared to the present pathetic way in which humans communicate.” He suspects that visual information may eventually be possible, but that will take some time to develop. He even imagines the sharing of memories. That may be possible, he says, “but maybe not in my lifetime.”
Put all this together, says Warwick, and “the body becomes redundant.” Moreover, when connected in this way “we will be able to understand each other much more.”
A double-edged sword
We also talked about the potential risks.
“There’s the risk of bugs in hardware or software,” says Naam. “There’s the risk of malware or viruses that infect this. There’s the risk of hackers being able to break into the implants in your head. We’ve already seen hackers demonstrate that they can remotely take over pacemakers and insulin pumps. The same risks exist here.”
But the big societal risk, says Naam, stems entirely from the question of who controls this technology.
“That’s the central question I ask in Nexus,” he says. “If we all have brain implants, you can imagine it driving a very bottom’s up world — another Renaissance, a world where people are free and creating and sharing more new ideas all the time. Or you can imagine it driving a world like that of 1984, where central authorities are the ones in control, and they’re the ones using these direct brain technologies to monitor people, to keep people in line, or even to manipulate people into being who they’re supposed to be. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Warwick, on the other hand, told me that the “biggest risk is that some idiot — probably a politician or business person — may stop it from going ahead.” He suspects it will lead to a digital divide between those who have and those who do not, but that it’s a natural progression very much in line with evolution to date.
In response to the question of privacy, Sandberg quipped, “Privacy? What privacy?”
Our lives, he says, will reside in the cloud, and on servers owned by various companies that also sell results from them to other organizations.
“Even if you do not use telepathy-like systems, your behaviour and knowledge can likely be inferred from the rich data everybody else provides,” he says. “And the potential for manipulation, surveillance and propaganda are endless.”
Our cloud exoselves
Without a doubt, the telepathic noosphere will alter the human condition in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. The Noosphere will be an extension of our minds. And as David Chalmers and Andy Clark have noted, we should still regard external mental processes as being genuine even though they’re technically happening outside our skulls. Consequently, as Sandberg told me, our devices and “cloud exoselves” will truly be extensions of our minds.
“Potentially very enhancing extensions,” he says, “although unlikely to have much volition of their own.”
Sandberg argues that we shouldn’t want our exoselves to be too independent, since they’re likely to make mistakes in our name. “We will always want to have veto power, a bit like how the conscious level of our minds has veto on motor actions being planned,” he says.
Veto power over our cloud exoselves? The future will be a very strange place, indeed.
The subtext of the furor over Google Reader’s shutdown is that Google no longer considers publishers its primary customers. Google folk (particularly Marissa Mayer) used to talk quite eloquently about how best way to ensure someone would return to the site was to send them away quickly. Google Plus doesn’t even have an open API (yet), there is nothing you will get from Google Plus without driving into the horrendous cul-de-sac that is plus.google.com. Just last week, I was reminiscing about the fury when Google launched a toolbar update that allowed Google to offer user’s features on top of the pages they were browsing. This was also the guiding philosophy of Google’s unfairly-maligned OpenSocial product. These products represent a philosophy turned 180 degrees relative to Google Plus; to use google’s software you never even had to navigate to Google.com.
Google’s shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus and Glass, represent the complete rejection of the “send them away so they will return philosophy” which was the primary reason that nerds (like me) fell in love with Google in the first place. Google is replacing a strategy that was easily understood and straightforward with one that is nearly Orwellian in scope. They’re already quite far down this road, but the shuttering of Google Reader makes it clear for all to see. Google is a different company than it used to be, but the dramatic turn feels like a turn to ‘evil,’ and that’s quite sad for me.
I was at Target yesterday and this little girl wanted to buy Halo 4, but this lady came up to her and said video games are for boys. This lady had a box of trix in her cart and so the girl grabs the box and said ‘and trix are for kids.’ and ran off with the cereal and the game.
Even superheroes like to pretend to be someone else from time to time and imagine going on different adventures. Artist Kyle Latino gives us this cheerful image of DC's all-girl gaming group.
Some of these ideas are cool. Most of them dont look so good but meh...
Sometimes, DIY isn't pretty. In fact, sometimes it's downright ugly and rickety, but it's cheap and it works. Let's give some homage to our favorite janky, amazing hacks from over the years. More »
Following the news that a child had been “functionally cured” of HIV, a new study from the Pasteur Institute’s unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris shows that even some adults can be similarly cured if treatment is started early enough. Out of 70 adults who were treated between 35 days and 10 weeks after being infected — much earlier than most receive treatment — 14 went off medication without a relapse. Researcher Asier Sáez-Cirión says the key is treating the disease early, because “it limits the reservoir of HIV that can persist, limits the diversity of the virus and preserves the immune response to the virus that keeps it in check.” The 14 adults in the study still have traces of the virus in their blood, but at low enough levels that their immune systems can keep it in check without medication.
Umm. The birds and the bees talk would be totally weird in that family.
If ever there was a heartwarming (or stomach-turning, depending on your affinity for amphibians) story to kick off your weekend, it is this one. Mike Archer, a scientist at the University of New South Wales, is on the cusp of successfully cloning an extinct species of frog called Rheobatrachus, better known as the gastric-brooding frog. The frog, which went from initial discovery in 1972 to its eventual extinction in 1983, is famous for the unique way it gives birth. As discovered by Mike Tyler of the University of Adelaide, the mother literally swallows its own eggs and then stops producing stomach acid so they can hatch in her belly, live as tadpoles, and six weeks later are "born" as the mother frog vomits them up.
Here’s a fun way to break up the monotony in the old cubicle farm. The Mug Plotter will let you expertly inscribe your coffee vessel with a different witty saying or design for each day of the week. If it looks familiar that’s because it’s loosely based on the non-flat drawing robot, the Eggbot.
[Teed] built the machine using laser cut plywood parts. He starts off the build description with the griping technique. There are two parts to this, one is concave and fits in the mouth of the mug. The convex side grips the bottom edges of it. These parts go on the frame along with the slide and thread rods which hold the stylus. A servo motor is along for the ride, providing the ability to lift the marker when necessary.
You can see in the clip after the break that there’s a bit of oscillation in the rig when one of the steppers starts turning really fast. But it doesn’t seem to affect the look of the design very much at all.
Cool. I hope she and others like her continue doing cool stuff. I didn't even get my first computer till I was 14. She's on 2 platforms with 3 or 4 languages. LOL.
Amy Mather is thirteen years old. She made a presentation at last week’s Raspberry Jamboree in Manchester, where she explains how she got into programming and why she loves it: “I wanted to make it do what I wanted it to do, not what the people working at Apple or Android wanted it to do”. Amy walks us through Conway’s Game of Life, which she ends up building…well, I won’t spoil it for you. Watch this one all the way through; it’s worth it.
In the week since the Jamboree, I think I’ve had more emails about Amy’s presentation than about anything else – people have wanted to know when the video will be ready (word about this excellent presentation spread very fast on Twitter), and to congratulate Amy.
I’m very struck by the number of different organisations that have been supporting Amy; Codecademy, Young Rewired State, the Raspberry Jams and Manchester Girl Geeks have all helped her on her journey. If you want to see more kids like Amy, there’s something you can do: support these organisations by volunteering or donating. We can’t expect schools to do it all for us; the wider engineering community has, we believe, a responsibility to give kids like Amy all the opportunities to learn she can get her crocodile clips on. The Raspberry Pi is all about putting opportunities in the way of kids, so they have a chance to discover, like Amy, something new that they can quickly become skilled at, and that they love doing.
Alan O’Donohoe, who organises the Jams with the energy of a toddler with a coffee machine, has blogged more about the day on the Raspberry Jams site. Well done Amy – and thanks Alan!
What I thought. Reader is getting shut down because it is not used and doesnt support G+. Um. Data - Meet Executives. Executives - Meet Data.
The beloved but doomed Google Reader is still a healthy source of traffic. Google+, on the other hand…
According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+. The above chart, created by BuzzFeed's data team, represents data collected from August 2012 to today. (Yesterday, Google announced that it would close Reader in July.)
We should add that this data isn't complete. Google Reader traffic became much harder to measure last year when Google began defaulting users to SSL encryption in such a way that masked referral data. And this doesn't include data from apps that use Google Reader as a sync service, such as Reeder. In other words, it's likely that we're actually missing some Reader traffic here.
The second graphic* shows measured Reader and Google+ referrals over time. This one, too, requires qualification: The changes in Reader's numbers can be explained mostly by the addition of new sites to BuzzFeed's partner network, not growth in Google Reader (the total number of visitors to partner sites increased, in other words).
But the relative numbers are still surprising: Despite claims that it has over 100m monthly active users, Google+ barely moves the needle for sites across the network, while Reader is a healthy source of readers.
*For reference: in August of 2012, according to the same data, Facebook drove over 70m visitors to sites in the network while Google Reader was well under 10m.
I have been using this for a while now on my Mac. Love it.
I wrote a few new PopClip extensions over the weekend. There were several features from the Markdown Service Tools that I thought would be really handy to have right after making a mouse selection.
BulletList
The first one is an extension to turn lines of text into Markdown bullet items. Indentation is handled as nested lists and existing markers are overwritten (so a numbered list converts to a bullet list). I frequently type quick notes on single lines and then later add formatting, so this is already being used quite a bit on my system. It’s also handy when copying lists from websites and pasting to plain text as they lose their formatting in the process.
BulletList isn’t just for bullet lists, though. Holding option while clicking the extension in the PopClip popover will create/update a numbered list instead. If it’s run on an already-numbered list, it will update (“fix”) the ordering in the list.
NumberedList
This is only here if you want a separate button for numbered lists. I made it before I decided to add the option-key feature to BulletList. It does exactly the same thing as Option-clicking the BulletList extension. If that’s natural for you, don’t install the extra extension.
Blockquote
This one turns indented text into a nested Markdown block quote. It reads the indentation of the text and determines the level of block quoting to apply.
Code
I really came up with creative names for these, didn’t I? This will, as you guessed, turn selected text into Markdown code. Here’s the cool part, though: if your selection is within a paragraph, it will turn it into inline code. If it’s multiple lines, it will create a code block.
When creating an inline code block, it will also detect whitespace at the beginning and end of the selection and make sure that it’s excluded from the surrounding backticks.
Outdent
This one also differs from the Service Tools slightly. Instead of just moving everything out one tab or four spaces, it takes the line closest to the left edge, fully outdents it and then applies the outdent to any nested lines in the selection, maintaing indentation. It really had to be this way, as making a selection repeatedly is far less convenient than adding a shortcut to a service and hitting a hotkey a couple of times.
The extensions are up on Github. The download below has these extensions as well as the last few all packaged up and ready to install (I think, let me know if it doesn’t work).
