I've updated my RENDER.GEMTEXT to handle my version of linking. Not sure if it'll stick around so I'm going to be trying it out sparingly. You should now see some stuff in the sidebar. I'm going to be bringing in 100kb of js so I can get the arrows pointing properly. Even saying that in text sounds pretty dumb. Maybe I should stick with just using the {checkbox hack}[Checkbox Hack to Hide and Show Elements] to display and hide the sidebar stuff.
I could also implement regular linking and call it even. That might be the simplest way. I have the structure to put stuff in the sidebar but I'm not a fan of how messy my RENDER.GEMTEXT routine has become. There is definitely something to be said about forcefully keeping things simple and line oriented.
I'm going to remove my sidebar logic stuff and drop adding the arrows because it's too messy and too much extra stuff. I'm sure there is a way to do it where I'm happy but I don't want to deal with it right now. I'm going to implement regular linking but keep using curly braces as my link method. The curly brace and square bracket are faster to type for me than the parenthesis. It won't be exactly markdown but some style of it.
I should probably look into a simple format that is easy to emit html for.
Now that I can see the sidebar maybe just getting rid of the styling of the main body and leaving it {disconnected} [This looks cool enough and I could probably write a whole novel as a tangent now which is an ideal of mine.] from the side bar is enough.
Might be worth keeping this.
After thinking about I think just keeping the {curly braces} [The best kind of braces to be honest] might be fine. I don't really care about binding it to an anchor point now. It might be good to keep so that in the future I could always add arrows somehow but just the sidebar stuff is good enough. {I've talked myself into keeping the current design.} [Especially now that my notes alternate, I like it quite a bit]
The next big step is going to be write my templating render program because currently my BASIC programs are becoming unwieldy with the amount of string {munging} [Munging is a weird word. Vague data transformation steps] going on.
Now that I have this, I'm probably going to want to embed markdown in my sidebar text. Oh no!