Tinderbox Meetup MARKDOWN WORKFLOW on SATURDAY Dec 20

Tinderbox & Storyspace Events
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Bring your projects and puzzlements! Everyone is welcome. Long-time Tinderbox users, new Tinderbox users, and non-Tinderbox users are very welcome to join in on the discussion.

Tinderbox Setup for Markdown

Jacob Evans continues a fascinating forum discussion of customizing Tinderbox’s text handling.

Jacob Evans is a technologist with over 20 years of experience building and leading high-performing software development teams. Outside of technology, he has many interests, including the science of productivity, astronomy, and travel. He is also the co-host of Leader Fables, a podcast made by leaders for leaders. Jacob resides in the western United States—Salt Lake City, Utah to be exact—with his lovely wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Tinderbox Best Practices

We plan to start with a fresh visit to the Best Practices project.

Tinderbox Trainers Wanted

We are inviting Tinderbox community members to deliver a “Tinderbox in 10-minute Training” session. We want to kick off each weekly Tinderbox meetup with a 10-minute training that explores a Tinderbox feature and explains how to use it in a specific context. Again, the training should explain what the feature does and provide a contextual example of how the training is using it (sample files are most welcome). If you’d like to provide one of these trainings, please DM @satikusala or @eastgate on the Tinderbox Forum, and we’ll schedule your session on the Tinderbox Meetup Calendar.

9 AM Pacific Time
Noon Eastern time
1300 São Paulo
1600 UTC
1700 London
1800 Paris
2130 Delhi

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6179249044?pwd=c0szQnZaaGUrWGsxalZKK1dSejFEZz09&omn=81068119678

Meeting ID: 617 924 9044
Passcode: tinderbox

For more details and to join the conversation with the Tinderbox community, visit the Tinderbox Forum: https://forum.eastgate.com/.Bring your projects and puzzlements! Everyone is welcome. Long-time Tinderbox users, new Tinderbox users, and non-Tinderbox users are very welcome to join in on the discussion.

Tinderbox Best Practices

We plan to start with a fresh visit to the Best Practices project.

Tinderbox Trainers Wanted

We are inviting Tinderbox community members to deliver a “Tinderbox in 10-minute Training” session. We want to kick off each weekly Tinderbox meetup with a 10-minute training that explores a Tinderbox feature and explains how to use it in a specific context. Again, the training should explain what the feature does and provide a contextual example of how the training is using it (sample files are most welcome). If you’d like to provide one of these trainings, please DM @satikusala or @eastgate on the Tinderbox Forum, and we’ll schedule your session on the Tinderbox Meetup Calendar.

9 AM Pacific Time
Noon Eastern time
1300 São Paulo
1600 UTC
1700 London
1800 Paris
2130 Delhi

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6179249044?pwd=c0szQnZaaGUrWGsxalZKK1dSejFEZz09&omn=81068119678

Meeting ID: 617 924 9044
Passcode: tinderbox

For more details and to join the conversation with the Tinderbox community, visit the Tinderbox Forum: https://forum.eastgate.com/.

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Folks, it was a joy attending and demoing at today’s meetup. Thank you for your participation and the lively discussion.

As promised, please see a simplified version of the Tinderbox I demoed today. I plan to upload a more advanced version after I draft some documentation detailing setup steps for integrating with Shortcuts, Pandoc, Claude and other Markdown parsers.

Again, thank you all and happy holidays! :star::christmas_tree::dizzy:

DemoBox Simplified.tbx (598.7 KB)

Update (Sunday, 21 December 2025): I fixed a bug in the urlToNote() function that wasn’t properly encoding spaces in Tinderbox file names resulting in broken links back to Tinderbox from OmniFocus.

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Thanks a lot for your presentation, @JacobIO! And thanks for giving me something to learn from (and play with) over the holiday season. Much appreciated!

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Video: Tinderbox Meetup 2025-12-20

Chat:
chat.txt (7.2 KB)

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Thanks @JacobIO and @eastgate, this looked great - sadly too sick to have joined and fearful of sneezing through an intercontinental zoom interface.

Is this example built on a new default document? There’s (useful looking) branches with unfamiliar icons in /Hints/Highlighters and a /Config new to me.

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Jacob,

Thanks again for a remarkable demonstration of how Tinderbox can be used in new and innovative ways.

If you’re still monitoring this channel, could you also please post a screenshot of the Shortcut you use to capture the weather? Perhaps I can grab it from the video, but I haven’t tried yet.

Also, to the community at large, there’s an interesting kind of synchronicity, or coincidence-collision, in this blog post from Zsolt Benke. “Threaded” thinking, albeit with a different outliner application. It was intriguing because it might be incorporated with Jacob’s approach to Claude integration, which doesn’t require an MCP (if I recall all that correctly).

Fascinating stuff.

And, shame on me, I just found Jacob’s blog, which contained this post integrating MacChatGPT with Tinderbox by way of Shortcuts. (Subscribed!) Seems relevant to our interests. If it was posted somewhere in the Forum before, apologies.

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@JacobIO Just chiming in here to say this truly impressive and elegant and I very much appreciate you being willing to share this with us. Cheers!

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Thank you @JacobIO.

Is this Demo-TBX capable of handling Footnotes in Markdown?

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No, but the more advanced version that I’m working on will include instructions on how to use a Markdown parser that supports footnotes, such as Multi-Markdown.

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Dave, thank you for your kind words and encouragement. You can find the “Weather Conditions” Shortcut that I demoed here. Please feel free to post any questions you may have about how it works.

Note: The “simplified” TBX file that I posted does not include the weather adornment that I showcased during the meetup. But I will be posting a more advanced version of that TBX that includes the weather adornment amongst a few other things.

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Yes, the example Tinderbox that I posted was built, more or less, from the default document. I believe the /Hints/Highlighters container is added when you run the File ▸ Built-In Hints command.

The /Config container, however, is of my own creation. It contains notes whose attribute values are used in parts of my action code. I use this as a way to define file-specific variables or values I may want to tweak without hunting through the code.

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Excellent, thanks! I’ll be playing with this and the other features and get back with questions (inevitably).

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Through keeping functions in the Library is almost always good practice, I wonder whether it might be fun to build a completely self-contained weather adornment in which all the functions required were declared in the adornment itself. That way, one could copy the adornment, paste it into a new document, and it would work straight off, without any installation at all.

Just a thought.

(It might be interesting to think through whether it might be better to do this using a poster note, or even a conventional notes as a dashboard, allowing you to add a weather widgets to outlines. What other widgets might be handy to have?)

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This is a good idea! I’m going to give it a go. Thanks for the inspiration, Mark.

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TBX Meetup Sat. 20 DEC 25: Tinderbox Meetup 20 DEC 2025: Markdown Workflow and Memory Board with Jacob Evans

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This might be a good moment to remind everyone that Package Management—which Chuck @echuck, Mark @mwra, and Michael @satikusala have been working on since the beginning of the year—has become a valuable resource. It could be used to package functions from Jacob’s Markdown template as well, making them easy to add to existing documents.

Are you familiar with this approach, @JacobIO?

Reference

Thanks to everyone who tirelessly contributes to this.

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I am, but have not had the time to devote to building a package or installer for my Markdown note “system.”

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What you say “Package Management” do you mean the “installer process”?

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Great!