📙 Markdown Wiki

Keep a wiki in Visual Studio Code.

You can get this extension in two ways:

• By going directly to the Visual Studio marketplace ¹.
• By searching markdown-wiki in the Extensions Tab of Visual Studio Code.

This extension has three clusters of functionality:

• Analytics
• Footnotes
• Linking

Let's start with Analytics!

Analytics

This extension has many options for analyzing your writing.

The first (and most important) is ARI. ARI stands for automated readability index. We use it to check to readability. ². Here's how:

If a sentence is greater than 11 words, we flag it with:

• Warning: "Hard to read" if the ARI >= 10 and ARI < 14
• Error: "Very hard to read" if the ARI >= 14
• Error: If the sentence is longer than 25 words

Note: The average reader only understands text at an 8th grade level. This is ARI < 10 ³. The average reader also finds a sentence with more than 25 words very hard to read ⁴.

The extension can also analyze your writing using these libraries:

• Proselint ⁵. Must be installed on your system.

Note: All of these libraries are disabled by default. If desired, you can enable them in your Visual Studio Code Settings. proselint can also be a bit slow, so it does not run on every text change. Instead, you need to save the document for proselint to run.

You may want to analyze more than just your open file. These commands make that possible.

• Analyze Files: Analyze every .md file in your workspace with enabled libraries. This command will also check for three other things. One, missing wiki links. Two, missing asset links. Three, missing or unmatched footnotes.

• Delete Orphaned Assets: Delete any asset not linked in a Markdown file. Specifically, this command will delete any files of type png, jpeg, jpg, svg, gif, wav, or mp3. This command is destructive, so use it carefully!

Footnotes

Managing Markdown footnotes is a pain.

• Automatically check missing or unmatched footnotes in a file on every save.

• Automatically order footnotes and endnotes via Ctrl/Cmd+ shift + '. Pandoc must be installed on your system for this command to work ⁶.

• Insert a url on your clipboard as a Markdown footnote via Ctrl/Cmd+ '. Your footnotes and endnotes will be ordered automatically after insertion.

Linking

Wiki links represent an internal link to another file. They have become widely adopted because they are short and easy to read. Here's how we use them:

• You have the wiki link [[security]] in a file called cool.md.
• If that link matches the name of another file, security.md, we will recognize it as a link.
• We will also handle variation in capitalization and pluralization.
• So you can write [[Security]] or [[securities]] in cool.md without error!

On the flip side, if there is no match, we will flag the link as a broken link. We will also flag any asset link without a match. For example, if you write ![icon](/icon.png) but icon.png does not exist, we will throw an error. Just make sure that each asset link is an absolute link. Otherwise, it will be flagged as missing by default!

Footnotes

1. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=successible.markdown-wiki ↩

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_readability_index ↩

3. https://readable.com/blog/what-is-the-average-persons-reading-level/ ↩

4. https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/04/sentence-length-why-25-words-is-our-limit/ ↩

5. https://github.com/amperser/proselint ↩

6. https://pandoc.org/installing.html ↩