adobe indesign - Convert paragraphs to specific style based on content?

I really like plain text writers, such as Ulysses and the recently found Bear (both Mac). I'm currently writing my thesis and I enjoy styling. However, something that really annoys me is the gap between a plain text writer and InDesign. I can't easily copy over text from a simple writer to InDesign. So I'm looking for a way to minimise that gap.

I noticed that Bear, for example, uses Markdown as an output. If you copy header-1 (i.e. "This is a header") text to InDesign that paragraph will be output like "# This is a header". When you have a header-2 it adds 2 '#' in front and quotes obtain a '>' in front of the paragraph.

With that discovery I was thinking of automatically convert each paragraph to a specific style based on a ruleset, depending on the first character of a sentence.

if rule starts with "#" then apply paragraph style "header-1".

Additionally, that hashtag should be removed, but that could be done with a find & replace (find "# " and replace with "").

But uh.. Is it possible to apply paragraph styles based on certain rules? Preferably automating this thing?

Answer

Do you mean like Markdown to InDesign does? (skip the Word part)