Introducing Task Time Estimates

Didact does a great job of providing a basic framework for adding superpowers to your Markdown and AsciiDoc-based files in VS Code. But what about when you want to let the user know how long a particular task might take and have that information bubble up in the Didact Tutorials view?

Adding Estimated Time

Most tutorials are already broken into distinct sections defining particular tasks or steps to accomplish something. Now you can simply add a little time notation.

In Markdown, these notations look like {time=2}. And in AsciiDoc they look like [role="time=6"]. These notations simply add a bit of context to a heading to let Didact know that there is an associated time estimate.

These time notations should appear to the right of a heading (Markdown) or above a heading (AsciiDoc).

Note: Currently time notations must be specified for a particular heading element and cannot be used in regular text. We use the association with a heading to show these time-boxed sections in the Didact Tutorial tree.

That might look like (in Markdown):

# Completing the thing

...

## Doing the first task. {time=5}

...

## Doing the second task. {time=3}

...

This is the same approach for AsciiDoc:

= Completing the thing

...

[role="time=5"]
== Doing the first task.

...

[role="time=3"]
== Doing the second task.

...

If you register this tutorial (right-click your Markdown or AsciiDoc-based Didact file and select Didact: Register Tutorial), you would see something similar to:

+-- Didact Tutorials
+-- My Tutorials
|   +-- Completing the thing (~8 mins)
    |      +-- Doing the first task. (~5 mins) 
    |      +-- Doing the second task. (~3 mins)