Render checkboxes as unicode with markup hiding enabled?

[jtherrmann]

First, thanks for this great package.

With markdown-hide-markup enabled, is there a way to render unchecked boxes (- [ ]) as a unicode character such as ☐ (U+2610) and checked boxes (- [x]) as a character such as ☑ (U+2611)? Currently they render like:

• [ ]
• [x]

which I find visually distracting.

If this feature isn't currently supported, is there a possibility it could be implemented?

[syohex]

How about using prettify-symbols-mode as below?

(setq markdown-hide-markup t)
(defun my-markdown-mode-hook ()
  (when markdown-hide-markup
    (setq-local prettify-symbols-alist '(("[ ]" . ?☐)
                                         ("[x]" . ?☑)))
    (prettify-symbols-mode +1)))

I'm not sure whether it should be implemented in markdown-mode, because this depends on user font settings.

[jtherrmann]

I'll give that a shot, thanks!

[jtherrmann]

@syohex Hmm, this does not seem to work with markdown-hide-markup enabled, I assume because the markup hiding overrides prettify-symbols-mode.

I'm not sure whether it should be implemented in markdown-mode, because this depends on user font settings.

There could be a variable for configuring the strings to use for displaying checkboxes, e.g. markdown-empty-checkbox-string and markdown-full-checkbox-string, set to "☐" and "☑" by default. The user could set these to whatever they prefer, e.g. "[ ]" and "[x]" if they don't like the appearance of the unicode characters.

The current situation is less than ideal, because the - in - [ ] gets rendered as a bullet character with markup hiding enabled, so a checkbox item gets rendered as:

• [ ]

which I find to be distracting.