It most likely can't convert the html tag to stay as html. an <h1/> tag literally is a header with one # in markdown. Markdown was meant to be a more human read/write able form of HTML, where its meant to directly translate to HTML.

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For "inserting markdown" I wish I had a better example ready, I haven't open-sourced this thing yet (or finished it) but it started as an idea to make using my existing note system more powerful / easy to use without actually opening a file.

All my notes from day to day are in markdown, and lets say I use a template with something like below, so that I have a dedicated note file for every single day. (I use a cool VS code extension called Dendron which is similar to Obsidian for markdown notes)

# TODO
* cure cancer
* take a nap

# Ideas
* turn water to wine

# Meetings

## Meeting 1
blah blah

## Meeting 2...
blah

I want to be able to quickly jot down an idea or todo item, but I don't want to have to actual do the mental context switch of switching windows and finding the daily file. My work computer is a mac laptop, and ive found Alfred to be a very powerful and flexible tool to do basically anything from any context.

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So ideally I could have an Alfred command for "ideas" or "todos" etc... that would insert a string of text into my daily notes into the right spot. So in this case something like `inst $todo email joe about that thing` would insert "email joe about that thing" into a list block under a header tag called 'todo'

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with an output like:

TODO

• cure cancer
• take a nap
  • email joe about that thing

Ideas

• turn water to wine

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But that got me thinking, there's potential for a powerful / flexible system of converting markdown into a tree like AST syntax that would let me reference different levels of the note similar to how one could reference nester JSON.

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So I started exploring pandoc, which converts all sorts of things into an AST (Abstract syntax tree) which is almost what I want, except its flat. No hierarchy except bulleted lists. To me, a <h2> below an <h1> is a second level in - BUT pandoc would treat it as a flat list of different markdown elements.

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I started out trying to write a python pandoc filter (see https://pandoc.org/filters.html ) but realized its intended design couldn't do what I want, but that doesn't really matter as pandoc can handle reading/writing from/to a pandoc AST, so any python script that reads in and spits out a compatible tree will work fine.

SO I created a python script that can handle SOME Markdown aspects, turn it into a nested tree, and spit back out a flat tree, which can then be used as ran through pandoc again to get markdown back out. Once I have that tree, I can start to design a syntax for specifying a part of the tree, and text I want to add, resulting in a modified nested tree, which can still be ultimately converted back to markdown.

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Unfortunately I haven't opened sourced it yet, I haven't finished but realistically its got enough functionality to be worth sharing as WIP. I hope all this made sense, I'm not sure if I've explained this project to anyone in this much detail yet.