Formatting your writing

Select some text and a small bar appears above it. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, code, link, list, quote, heading.

You don’t have to highlight first. Put the caret in a word and press ⌘⇧F — same bar, sitting on that word. Right-click does the same, and the usual system menu still appears. Escape or the next letter you type puts it away.

Or use the shortcuts: ⌘B for bold, ⌘I for italic, ⌘U for underline. They wrap the word the caret is in. On a new line, type / and pick a heading or a list from the menu.

Why you don’t see asterisks

Dayspring stores entries as Markdown — a plain-text format, which is a large part of why your writing will still be readable in twenty years and openable in any text editor.

But Markdown means symbols: **bold**, # heading, > quote. Most apps show you those symbols and expect you to live with them.

Dayspring hides them. Bold a word and you see a bold word. The asterisks are in the file, but they only appear when your cursor moves inside that word — so you can edit them if you want to, and otherwise never think about them.

If you’d rather see the raw characters all the time, there’s a Show markdown syntax switch in Settings → Writing.

Lists

Type - and a space, and you’re in a bullet list. Press Return for the next item; press it twice to get out. Numbered lists renumber themselves when you insert one in the middle. Tab indents, Shift-Tab steps back out.

For checkboxes, use the To-do command in the slash menu.

Highlights

⌘⇧H highlights the selection. (Not ⌘H — macOS reserves that for hiding the app.)

There’s more than one highlighter colour; the swatches sit beside the highlight button in the format bar.

Headings

Three sizes, from the slash menu or by typing #, ##, ### at the start of a line.

You rarely need them in a daily entry, but they earn their keep in a long retreat entry or a set of sermon notes.

Dividers

On a line of its own, type --- — or pick Divider from the slash menu. It becomes a quiet break in the page, painted to match the palette you’re writing in. Click it and the dashes come back, so you can delete it.

Marking a passage

There’s one formatting action that only appears on entries from a previous day: Mark this passage.

That’s on purpose. Marking is a reading act, not a writing one — it’s for when you come back to something months later and realise it mattered. You can’t mark a sentence you wrote ten seconds ago, because you don’t know yet.

Something odd worth knowing

If a line starts with several spaces of indentation, Markdown treats it as a code block, and it’ll turn monospaced. If your text unexpectedly looks like code, that’s why — remove the leading spaces and it returns to normal.