Nutshell!
I’ve just added to my site! It’s a brilliantly straightforward tool written by Nicky Case for “expandable, embeddable explanations”. My favorite part is how, when a longer nutshell interrupts a sentence, it recaps the first part of the sentence at the end (so you can see the original context without having to close the nutshell). You can see that by expanding the :nutshell earlier in this paragraph, then scrolling down.
Read more about the whole project on the main Nutshell page, or check out the repository, which documents some of the more advanced functions and details.
I’m particularly excited about this because I sometimes find it difficult to write without asides, especially for a varied audience and on technical topics (because the amount of detail and summarization should be pretty different for different audiences). Of course in some ways, clarity in writing always requires effort, there’s no way around that! It doesn’t help that I’m out of practice.
And yet: writing is communicating, and plenty of other tools make it MUCH easier to frame your writing (like graphs, tables, illustrations, or footnotes). So now I’ve added nutshells to the tool belt, and we’ll see how it turns out. At the very least it’s been fun to play with.
A few notes on usage, mostly for myself
Basic syntax is pretty simple:
I've just added [:Nutshell](https://ncase.me/nutshell/#WhatIsNutshell) to my site!A nutshell link starts with a colon, and you can include headers so it only includes specific sections. I’m using markdown to write this, so it’s in markdown. You can also embed external links the same way, but the site has to support CORS. The documentation in the repository has more details.
I suspect I’ll mostly use nutshell for , and it took me a couple rereads to find it in the documentation, so I’ll explain it in… the nutshell. (Sorry.)