Add support for rich-text notes

[jpragma]

It would be extremely useful to have an additional tab in "Format Panel" that could be used to add an arbitrary note to the currently selected element. Supporting rich-text in these notes would be even better.

[gcaggia]

Support for markdown would also be highly appreciated.

Markdown with syntax highlighting for specific language.

Something like:

 ` ` `php 

 echo $a;

 ` ` ` 

will output:

 echo $a;

I am ready to help. Is it difficult to submit a PR for such feature?

Thank you.

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[Kryptortio]

If this gets added it would be nice if there was a small visible icon (maybe with an option to disable it when it's not needed) on all items with a note in the diagram so you can easily see that they exists. Also this icon could be used to show the note on a mouseover popup.

[loligans]

This feature would be so nice. I really like the comment's section in LucidChart, so if something similar existed for drawio, I would be thrilled

[davidjgraph]

Commenting does exist, this feature is specific to add formating to the existing tooltip functionality.

[Kryptortio]

Unless I'm missing something commenting does not exist without Gdrive or Confluence. So for everyone not using those this could help as an alternative to comments as well but a "note overview section" might not be in scope here.

Could be something you would want to take into consideration for the datamodel of notes though if you want to leave the possibility open for that feature and/or a comment feature that does not rely on an external service.

[davidjgraph]

Commenting requires a login for some concept of which user is commenting. What I'm not understanding is what the difference between the existing tooltip functionality (which supports HTML) and this notes concept is.

[Kryptortio]

I can only speak for myself but I think the original idea had nothing to do with tooltips (but the tooltip feature could be one way to accomplish the goal). If you wanted to reformulate this idea with the goal of solving it using the tooltip feature, I would put it like this:

1. Show the tooltip as a separate tab in the format panel (makes it a more prominent feature and easier/quicker to access)
2. Implement a (rich/WYSIWYG) text editor for the tooltip text (HTML is not easy for many to use but it's great that HTML works), markdown could be an option to support as well
3. When a tooltip exists display a small icon (optionally?) so that it's easy to see that the tooltip exists without having to mouse over every item in the diagram.

Personally I would be happy with just 3 but some editing (2) options would be nice since writing HTML is slower (and not something most people can do, related #2624). I believe 1 would be good for the product though because I've used draw.io a lot and I did not know about the tootip feature (seems like it's a bit hidden now in the edit menu, looks like it might have been removed from the right click menu at some point).

In regards to comments, I don't think login is strictly a requirement (but a good feature). When login is not available comments can still be useful (and adding a signature manually is an easy workaround). Again tooltip could serve as a solution/workaround for this except for the overview part that was mentioned.

[ironlion37]

Yes, this is a much needed feature! I've played around with the tooltips and it's a no go. Need to be able to paste rich text directly into a side panel and have an icon indicating the presence of note content on the corresponding shape in the diagram. Coming from Mindjet's Mindmanager, this was an essential feature that I used all the time. The main reason rich text is needed is for quickly pasting web page content and not losing the links. The notes panel visibility can be to toggled on and off by double clicking the note icon or pressing ctrl+t:

Here's a screenshot

Another great shortcut in MindManager is ctrl+k for adding a link to shape/topic. That also adds a little chain link icon on the topic/shape.

[davidjgraph]

Just to be clear, this is not a mind mapping tool. You could use it as such, but if you want to only use it for mind mapping, it's the wrong choice.

[ironlion37]

Hi @davidjgraph, thanks for the reply. Mind mapping and flow charts are closely related. If I can do both with one piece of software, that's a win. But, is there a mind mapping software I should know about? I've been searching for a good solution for a very long time and haven't been able to find it. Drawio is working great; this notepad feature and links are the only things I'm missing.

It seems that this notepad functionality we're discussing still makes sense within the framework of flowcharts.

Best...

[davidjgraph]

It's never just this or these features is the problem. To build a specific mind mapping tool would need a dedicated engineer, ultimately. It comes down to I don't want to pay out my money to fund that engineer for something I don't see any commercial return for.

[woodz-]

I'd suppose having a text box on a spreadsheet and enabling markdown for it, is all what we need.

A markdown engine should take care of syntax highlighting on its own, being able to recognize the syntax while editing.

There could be ready made dev packages for different languages, I haven't checked.

[davidjgraph]

Thanks for your suggestion of a feature request. Having reviewed the likely methods to implement it we've decided that the effort to implement it is excessive for the benefit. We do not want the added maintenance and security review of an external library to implement the functionality.

[dzylikecode]

Support for markdown would also be highly appreciated.

Markdown with syntax highlighting for specific language.

Something like:

 ` ` `php 

 echo $a;

 ` ` ` 

will output:

 echo $a;

I am ready to help. Is it difficult to submit a PR for such feature?

Thank you.

I have already developed a plugin to support it. Here is the code: https://github.com/dzylikecode/drawio-plugin-markdown. But I have encountered some issues, such as the inability to highlight code for the VSCode plugin. Could you please help me? Thank you very much! @gcaggia