An Enhanced Markdown Prototype

Tutorials and Examples
1

Hiya Tinderbox community!

As a follow-up to the demo I gave during the 20 Dec 2025 meetup[1], I finally got around to creating an installer that will add my enhanced Markdown prototype to any Tinderbox. You can read about how it works and what’s included at the project’s GitHub repo.

Installation

There are two installation options, but first a word of caution:

:warning: This installer will replace/update the built-in Markdown prototype in your Tinderbox document. Any customizations you have made to the existing Markdown prototype may be overwritten.

Option A: Download the Tinderbox file

Download install-tbx-markdown.tbx and open it in Tinderbox. It contains one note with the installer action code. Just copy and paste it into any Tinderbox to add the enhanced Markdown prototype.

Option B: Using a Stamp

Open any Tinderbox document, create a stamp with the following action code, and run it:

action(runCommand("curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jacobio/tbx-markdown/main/install.tbxc"));

All components are fetched from the GitHub repo at install time. Either method is safe to re-run.

MultiMarkdown

It’s worth noting that many of the features I demoed during the meetup were powered by a MultiMarkdown parser. The installer checks for mmd on your system by sourcing ~/.zprofile before running which mmd, with fallbacks to known Homebrew paths (/opt/homebrew/bin/mmd, /usr/local/bin/mmd) and system paths (/usr/bin/mmd). If found, it sets $HTMLPreviewCommand to pipe through mmd.

If mmd is not found, the prototype uses Tinderbox’s built-in “CommonMark” parser.

MultiMarkdown can be installed via Homebrew:

brew install multimarkdown

For those of you who work with Markdown in Tinderbox, I hope you find this prototype as useful as I have. Cheers :clinking_beer_mugs:

  1. There’s a second post about this meetup here, too. ↩︎

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2

Thanks for sharing and for the attention to detail on the explanation (at the repo site link).

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Yay!!! :slight_smile: Love it!!! :heart::folded_hands::man_bowing:

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Hi Jacob,

nice work! Since my setup relies on my own prototypes - I would like to separate your markdown functionality from the prototype.

How about a function to check for the mmd install (wrap the part after Detect MultiMarkdown & Set HTMLPreviewCommand into a function) and a stamp to add “Create & Configure Markdown Prototype” to any prototype?!
Last one that came to my mind: use your own namespace for the naming of all notes you create. And maybe it would be a good idea to add all attributes you modified to the displayedAttributes. This helps to customise the solution. Just an idea.
P.S.: and maybe the option to install the prism css files (not very large) as notes in TBX?! I try to avoid links to online resources in my TBX files. An installer could update the files if needed?!

Thanks for the great work!

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Just a word for people not already part of the backstage program: the way to install and use MultiMarkdown in Tinderbox is likely to change (and get easier) shortly.

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