15th June 2026

New content types for research

I've been lucky enough to have some time over the last few months to make a lot more progress with Open Research Notebook version 2.

One area I've been focusing on is the basic text editing experience, and supporting the kinds of content which are particularly useful for research.

The editor now supports:

code blocks with full syntax highlighting and autocompletion for many programming languages;
table creation and editing; and
mathematical notation

Under the hood, all text is still saved in the Markdown format. So the features I've added are those supported by the Markdown format, in particular the GitHub flavour of Markdown, which has some useful non-standard features. Some of these features can be quite fussy to work with in raw Markdown format, for example table creation. With that in mind, I have used a text editor which is flexible enough to embed dynamic components, such as a table widget with drag handles for creating new rows and columns. These dynamic widgets make editing and viewing data easier and more intuitive, even though the ultimate output is still the same – plain text.

As the video below shows, a popup menu allows you to insert tables, codeblocks, and so on: but there are also typing shortcuts which will achieve the same thing. For example, typing $$ at the start of a new line, followed by the enter key, will automatically insert a LaTeX mathematical notation block, opened in editing mode.

Improved revisions mode

I've also updated the revisions mode, so that the 'diff' view, which shows the changes between revision snapshots, is more sophisticated: it shows line numbers and highlights lines removed, added or edited, with colour coding.

Contact

Find me on the fediverse (Mastodon) @Lemmy@post.lurk.org, or send an email to: info [at] orsn.io