Markdown preview for Notes

[kainjow]

It'd be great to have support for previewing Markdown in the Notes section for added formatting. One could possibly have a UI similar to GitHub where you have "Write" and "Preview" tabs to toggle between. cmark could be used as the Markdown interpreter, and QtWebEngine could be used as the previewer (or use native Windows and macOS web controls wrapped in Qt).

[OLLI-S]

In KeePass I am able to add formatting in the notes with HTML Tags like <b> or <u>.
Here an example from KeePass (when I edit the entry):

In the "Entry View" of KeePass (that is shown below the list of password) this formatting is displayed correctly:

In KeePassXC the formatting is missing:

So for former KeePass users (that switched from KeePass to KeePassXC) it would be nice if the HTML formatting is displayed correctly.
If you decide to use markdown (what is more modern) I have no problems adjusting my password entries (105 entries use <b> but I would adjust this manually).

[droidmonkey]

Qt 5.14 introduced native markdown support in html document fields.

https://wiki.qt.io/New_Features_in_Qt_5.14

Qt Widgets

QTextEdit and QTextBrowser now support Markdown format (CommonMark and GitHub dialects) as an alternative to HTML.

Includes the GitHub checklist extension, such that you can click to toggle checkboxes if the widget is editable.

QTextBrowser::setSource() detects Markdown based on the file extension.

[OLLI-S]

Thank you for planning this in 2.6.0 ;-)

[gwisp2]

Hi!

I decided to contribute to open source and solve this issue.
Current work can be seen in my fork.
Qt supports documents with both Markdown and HTML used together.

However there are several pitfalls.

1. Line breaks work differently in HTML/Markdown and plain text, therefore multiline plaintext notes will break.
   One way to solve that is to replace plaintext line breaks with HTML/Markdown line breaks when displaying notes, but that makes markup a bit different from pure HTML/Markdown. In such way it is done in KeePass.
2. Markdown support in Qt 5.14 is buggy (https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-81060). We need to wait until Qt 5.14.1 is released.

[OLLI-S]

Sorry if I ask this stupid question:
Will we have HTML (#4228) or Markdown (#1057) syntax support in the notes?

[droidmonkey]

We will have both once Qt fixes their bugs. Markdown gets converted to HTML and you can add your own HTML inline with markdown.

[OLLI-S]

Cool, so I don't have to change my existing HTML tags in the comments.....

[networkException]

In this context, would it be a possible addition to allow referencing of entries / attributes using some kind of url?

<a href="keepass://group/to/entry/attribute:line">a reference to my other entry</a>

[droidmonkey]

Possible yes, that would be handled by an internal url handler. Good idea!

[OLLI-S]

In this context, would it be a possible addition to allow referencing of entries / attributes using some kind of url?

<a href="keepass://group/to/entry/attribute:line">a reference to my other entry</a>

This would be a nice feature....

[networkException]

It's been floating in my head for a while, good to hear positive response! Should I make a separate issue?

[droidmonkey]

Yes please

[OLLI-S]

@networkException And please link the new issue here, so I can subscribe it.
Thank you very much!

[networkException]

Alright I made a feature request with some examples how the sceme could look like #5369

[vphantom]

Just curious, did Qt 5.14.1 implement the fixes we were looking for? I see the milestone's been removed from this issue last year so I suspect even the latest Qt might still not be usable. I just want to figure out if this feature is imminent or still stalled indefinitely by Qt.

[droidmonkey]

They are implemented but we were waiting for most distros to get to at least 5.14. I'll mark this for 2.8.0 although my testing with it... for whatever reason clicking links still doesn't work....

[vphantom]

I see. I'm using your AppImage build to get your latest version these days. According to the debug info, it has Qt 5.15.2. I don't suppose you could easily enable this in the AppImage build while keeping it pending a bit longer in the binary builds then?

[DarkPark]

v2.7.4 and still no html or markdown support in Notes

[vphantom]

@DarkPark Look a few lines up: it's currently planned for v2.8.0.

[AaronKnowls]

It's great news that Markdown is going to be implemented in 2.8.0!
I'm so so looking forward to this, thank you!!!!

[ingenuity2k]

Just wanted to ask if this is still planned to be included in 2.8.0?
As I didn't see it mentioned on the Kanban board.

[droidmonkey]

It'll be included when we move to qt6, so yes

[DarkPark]

@droidmonkey
Are there any estimates? Even very approximate would be interesting to know )

[arigit]

Chiming in to say having this would be great, and to pair this with the request to have a simple search function that operates within the Note field of an open entry, #11314