Support for custom alert titles

[ShivamJoker]

Thanks for this library Chris!
It would be great if we allowed custom titles like Obsidian does.

> [!INFO] Why **CDK**?
> AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) is the easiest and faster way to get your AWS Lambda code up and running

Right now it gets rendered as a quote only instead of the alert:

[!INFO] Why CDK?
AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) is the easiest and faster way to get your AWS Lambda code up and running

This is how it looks in obsidian:

[chrisweb]

Note

regular note with no custom title gets rendered on github like this

vs

[!NOTE] my custom title
github test of a note alert with a custom title, breaks the alert and gets rendered as blockquote

Edit: hmmm as my little test above shows, github does not support custom titles and the goal of this plugin is to mimick what github does, this is why I'm not very eager to add features that they don't support because then something will work in your project but then if you also use that same markdown file on github it will not work, the goal of this plugin is to make things in your own project look the same as on github (and vice versa), on the other hand with this plugin you can create custom alerts, by defining new alert types in the options, so this is already something not supported on github, so yeah it is debatable if custom titles should get introduced in this plugin!?

maybe it would be better to create another plugin, maybe something called rehype-alerts, to not duplicate too much code maybe that plugin could be the "base" for the rehype github alerts plugin... any Ideas / feedback is welcome

I will not be able to work on this in the near future, I'm currently working on my new blog and I really need to finish that project first, but in the meantime we can brainstorm about what would make sense and also if custom titles should become a thing then it is very important to think hard about the format they will use:

• so that the new feature doesn't break any other markdown features
• so that it is easy to parse
• eventually future proof (if other features get added)

Edit2: by osidian I think you mean this tool https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Callouts right? It looks interesting, I can see why such a feature would be usefull for some people

in the meantime, something that works but obviously is not 100% what you request is to place a first sentece into the alert with bold formatting, like this:

Note

my custom title

github test of a note alert with a custom title

> [!NOTE]
> **my custom title**
>   
> github test of a note alert with a custom title  

or using a heading, like so:

Note

my custom title

github test of a note alert with a custom title

> [!NOTE]  
> ### my custom title
>   
> github test of a note alert with a custom title

[ShivamJoker]

I understand Chris.
Thanks for the reply.
The workaround looks good, I never thought of it.

[null9beta]

@ShivamJoker I know it's been a while since you left your message, still I also stumbled upon the same problem :)

Also, my need was not necessarily to have the same full box rendered as Obsidian does, rather than showing a custom title.
We´d been creating our Developer Portal, describing our public API that offers 2 languages.

So there had been 2 problems: a) the note Title itself is not translatable, so it would work for the English translation of the portal, but not for our German version; secondly, having the title next to the icon already describing the problem/warning would be great.

So @chrisweb, even though I fully understand your point of view, I feel it would be a great addition, making it so much more usable. There is also a looong discussion on the GitHub forum itself about this. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/103219

@ShivamJoker i created a fork and implemented the custom Alerts because I needed them for our project as mentioned above. If still necessary, feel free to use that one directly. I have not yet published it on npm, so for now, you could grab it straight from GitHub.

@chrisweb thanks first of all, this plugin is just great, still following the posts in the other threads and the last activity on the project, I wasn´t quite sure if I should open a Pull Request because you might not have time (which i also fully understand) to check on it, neither i am sure based on your feedback that its something you would backmerge.

Let me know if you want me to open a PR.

Cheers
Marco

[chrisweb]

@null9beta I will indeed not have a lot of time to have a look at it anytime soon, but...

a) feel free to post a link to your fork here for anyone interested
b) nothing wrong about continuing to discuss the feature in the meantime

There are some things I was wondering about (I have not checked your fork out yet), like which approach did you choose regarding the syntax, were the required changes to the code substantial, is there a risk the changes will break backward compatibility for previous users, meanining a major version jump would be required, ...

EDIT: I thought about it and was wondering about something: @null9beta couldn't you have used the custom alerts to create an "english note" and then a second one for "german note", ... (I know its not scalable, just wondering) and then switch between the two based on the selected language, because as I see it when you read a german article you will expect the title to be in german too, so you would use something like > [TIP_DE] in the markdown itself, and then for english you would use the "clone" like this > [TIP_EN], now when an english reader opens a page and written in german, then both the text and titles will be in german, a more dynamic technique would show titles in english (the readers language) and the text in german (the language of the content is german), which would be confusng, no!? Besides, by naming the custom alerts using a schema like LANGUAGE_ALERT-TYPE (or vice versa) could be controlled programmatically if needed

EDIT 2: I thought about it some more, the problem with this change is not the change itself, its the fact that this plugin is mimicking github, so logically we would only add features that they add too. meaning if they release an update for custom titles, then I would accept a fix here too, to make as being againg fully compatible with the alert system from github. if we do not wait for them and release our own "syntax" for custom titles and then they finally make their move, then we might be in trouble because we can't have two sytaxes competing for the same feature. besides our custom title might work differently from theirs, either ours is more flexible or theirs is, making a transition potentially a complex undertaking. so this is another concern, but it also means that if github makes their move, we will adapt and follow them. as of now it is a good idea to keep an eye on the disussion that null9beta shared: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/103219