FAQ - FoldingText

FoldingText is an extensible markdown text editor with productivity features.

Markdown Editor
Extensible with themes, scripts and plugins
Outlining, todos, timers for productivity

To create your own themes, scripts, and plugins open FoldingText's Help → Software Development Kit menu item then from there you can access the SDK documentation.

Themes are made from CSS/LESS rules that you put in your user.less file. To use a theme open FoldingText based app and:

Choose the File > Open Application Folder menu item.
Inside that folder open your existing user.less text file, or create a new one if none exists.
Paste in the theme extensions CSS/LESS rules and save.
Create a new document to see the theme applied.

Scripts are made of AppleScript code that you paste into the "AppleScript Editor" application to run.

To try a script:

Create a new test document in FoldingText.
Open the "AppleScript Editor" app and paste in the script.
Then press the green "Run" button to run the script.

If you decide to keep the script you should install it so that it's easier to run.

To install a script:

Open the "AppleScript Editor" apps preferences and make sure that "Show Script menu in menu bar" is checked.
Click on that item in your menu bar and choose "Open Scripts Folder > Open User Scripts Folder".
Save the script that you were testing into that folder. Make sure to save using the "Script" format, it's faster and some scripts won't work properly unless they are saved in "Script" format.

Once you've done this the script will be listed in the Script menu in your menu bar. To run the script just select it from that menu. You can also use tools such as FastScripts and Keyboard Maestro to setup keyboard shortcuts to launch scripts.

Plugins are folders that end with the .ftplugin file extension and contain JavaScript and other resources.

To install a plugin put it into FoldingText's Plug-In's folder:

Choose the File > Open Application Folder menu item and then locate the Plug-Ins folder.
Copy the plugin (which is a folder ending with .ftplugin) into the Plug-Ins folder.
Verify that a plugin is installed by choosing the FoldingText → Plugin Manager menu item and make sure the plugin is installed and has no errors. The plugin functionality should be available in any new documents that you open after installing the plugin.

First of all FoldingText is a plain-text editor, it can open any plain text file (of reasonable size) no matter what the formatting.

So by "support" I don't mean opening and editing (it can do that with any plain text file) I mean that FoldingText will recognize the given syntax and highlight it to make it easier to read. Also note that FoldingText doesn't have any special export of multi-markdown to other formats. For that you'd need to use Multimarkdown Composer, though you could of course still use FoldingText to edit the file.

Syntax highlighting supported:

definition lists

Syntax highlighting partially supported:

footnotes
image attributes
citations and bibliography (works best in LaTeX using BibTeX)

Syntax highlighting unsupported:

tables
math support
table and image captions
document metadata (e.g. title, author, etc)

FoldingText has two kinds of keybindings:

The standard "OS X menu item" shortcuts. These can be changed in System Preferences.
Internally defined keybindings. These take precedent over the "OS X menu item" shortcuts, and can be changed with a plugin.

To change an internal keybinding you need to create a plugin that adds the new binding. Here is an example plugin that shows how to add new keybindings.

Example plugin code for rebinding Home and End keys:

editor.addKeyMap({
    'Home' : 'moveToBeginningOfLine',
    'End' : 'moveToEndOfLine'
});

Modifiers can be combined with the bound keys: Shift-, Cmd-, Ctrl-, and Alt- (in that order).

Open "Terminal" and paste:

defaults write com.doubledogsoftware.FoldingText DefaultFileExtension [newextension]

My focus is on macOS and iPad for the foreseeable future.

Frequently Asked Questions