Your favourite feature? - Neuron

Survey: If there is one feature that should go in the next release of Neuron, what would you like that to be?

idea: template zettels

maybe using an already existing template format like <https://github.com/joaotavora/yasnippet>
(that is for emacs but it says that one can import templates from textmate, from which the syntax is inspired)

not sure if this is really editor independent

but otherwise just plain text is good enough, one would still be able to use an existing template language and write some glue code in their editor config to make it work nicely

and you generally have much less templates than zettels, so migrating from one template language to another isn't a problem i think

btw is there a way to remove embeds in zulip markdown?

What about dhall text?

I imagine there could be ./templates dir, from which I could instantiate template using neuron new <template>, plus there would be special names like footer.dhall that would get embedded into every note (which e.g. doesn't have footer: false attribute

btw is there a way to remove embeds in zulip markdown?

Not that I know of

@felko Not familiar with yasnippet, but I imagine we don't need a very flexible template system. Just have ./templates/daily.md which looks like this:

---
date: __DATE__
tags:
  - journal
---

# __TITLE__

## Agenda today

-

## Achieved today

Today I achieved, ...

Then neuron new --template=daily

Templates are a nice feature. They can work on Cerveau too.

We can even go one step ahead and support arbitrary key value pairs (neuron new --template=daily --data="key1=123"), with __KEY1__ somewhere in the template body.

@TheMatten I don't understand. How does dhall gets used, say, in the above example?

https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/328

I forget what I was waiting for haha, maybe theme-support? I guess one thing could be to figure out the alternative links situation?

The alternative links proposal here? https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/312

Oh yeah!

Sridhar Ratnakumar said:

We can even go one step ahead and support arbitrary key value pairs (neuron new --template=daily --data="key1=123"), with __KEY1__ somewhere in the template body.

not sure if that would be really convenient from the editor perspective, it's more intuitive to fill in the values visually
but again nothing prevents me from configuring my editor to work with yasnippet or whatever template language i want, without needing it to be implemented in neuron

@Sridhar Ratnakumar

> cat answer.dhall
let a = 42 in "Answer is ${Natural/show a}"
> dhall text --file answer.dhall
Answer is 42

Now, instead of just reusing dhall text command, we could evaluate loaded expression using custom special variables in scope (like stuff in Markdown header and arguments to neuron new)

So we would have full power of (total) programming language for templating

Cool

@TheMatten About the templates / function thing we talked about ... what's a good name for it? Just call it 'templates'? Or 'functions'? Or ...

{{ <name> | <args ...> }}

btw, here's another potential function to support: https://github.com/srid/neuron/issues/291#issuecomment-660075467

I guess they could be called functions, or "template functions" :big_smile: