Highlight Colors

The way you've implemented highlighting is very nice ... it's a calm pastel-like yellow. Most apps have very jarring bright highlights ... and thus I avoid highlighting just to the awful garish color choices. But ... in your case, with the subdued highlight of yellow, I'm wondering if you would consider offering a small palette of highlight colors (e.g. 5 colors). I know many folks who used colored highlights for different categories of "stuff". I don't know if this is hard to do, or goes beyond the ideals for Kosshi, but I think it may be worth considering.

For me, at least, I'll be using the pale yellow highlighter a fair amount. And I would use other colors if offered in the future.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Being able to choose from multiple highlight colors does sound useful, and I’d like to consider how I can best support this feature in Kosshi.

Since Kosshi stores formatting directly in Markdown text, the main challenge for multi-color highlights is how to represent the selected color in plain text.

I recalled that Bear (bear.app) has a similar feature, so I looked into it. They seem to use color emojis, such as ==🟡 text==.

https://community.bear.app/t/new-highlighter-addressing-your-feedback-and-next-steps/13771/24

This is an interesting design because it preserves the color information in Markdown and rarely conflicts with regular text. However, emojis can be a bit awkward to type manually.

At the moment, I’m wondering if a format like ==:red: text==, using emoji-style shortcodes, could be a good alternative.

I am a beta-tester for Lettera (from the Bear folks). It seems they've implemented this color coding of markdown in two "steps". Step 1: making it easy to implement for users, Step 2: making some sense when the final product is exported.

The markdown looks something like this for 2 highlights:
<mark>🟡This is a really nice way to write</mark>
<mark>🔵This means when I need to highlight.</mark>

However, as a user I don't need to know how to type in those emojis (which admittedly could be tricky). Instead they give you an intuitive "color picker" as shown in the image below. Essentially you just click on the highlighter-icon and you can then switch highlight colors to one of 5-6 choices.

... on the other hand your suggestion of:

At the moment, I’m wondering if a format like ==:red: text==, using emoji-style shortcodes, could be a good alternative.

It's not as elegant as the Lettera approach, but it would definitely work for me. I think it would work for others also ... as long as they didn't have to type in ":yellow:" for the default highlight color.

@mitchellm Thank you for the detailed Lettera explanation. That was very helpful.

I agree that a simple color picker in the UI is the right approach. Users should not have to type emojis or shortcodes by hand.

I was wondering whether to store the color as an emoji like ==🔵 text== or as a shortcode like ==:blue: text==. On second thought, emoji seems better for portability, since other apps may do something similar to Bear or Lettera.

Thanks for sharing your beta experience.

I'm loving Kosshi even more each day I use it. What a nicely designed product.