Markdown reference links screencast
August 26, 2012 at 11:03 AM by Dr. Drang
I made a short screencast of me using the Markdown reference link scripts I’ve shown in the last two posts. There’s no sound; the narration is typed on screen.
A few notes:
- I show myself choosing the commands from the BBEdit scripts menu, but I always use the keyboard shortcuts when I’m actually writing.
- Similarly, I show myself typing in the URL of a link, but I almost always paste in the link from the clipboard or use one of my TextExpander URL snippets.
- Sometimes the video starts out very blurry when viewed in fullscreen mode. I’m not sure why that happens, but rewinding and starting over has always corrected the blurriness for me. The video was recorded at 1152×720.
Here’s the text that appears on the screen during the video.
This is a screen recording to demonstrate how I use my Markdown reference link scripts.
Let’s say I want to link to the Google home page. If the text I want to use as the link is already in the document, I can just select it and call the New Reference Link command, either from the Scripts menu or through the ⌃L keyboard shortcut. I type (or paste) the URL into the dialog box, and the script runs, adding the reference to the bottom of the document and turning the selected text into a link.
On the other hand, if I haven’t typed the link text yet, I can invoke that same New Reference Link script, and it’ll insert a blank link that I can type the link text into: like this link to
When the URLs I want to link to are already in the document, I call the Old Reference link command, which is invoked through the menu or through ⌃⌥L. If the link text is in the document, I select it, call Old Reference Link, and choose the URL from the dropdown menu. Here’s an example of a link to a post on Nathan Grigg’s blog.
If the link text isn’t in the document, I can still call Old Reference Link, and it will add a blank link to the selected URL, with the cursor between the brackets waiting for me to type the link text, like this link to
That’s all!
