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>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for

>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. >anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter. Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. >Markdown will never get beyond developers. Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers. I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.

threatofrain 4y ago
> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. > Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
- Pereza0 4y ago
  There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mpweiher 4y ago
  > the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do. Which is kind of the point.
  - WolfOliver 4y ago
    then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.
    - orwin 4y ago
      No, but there is fun ways to do it. when i used Latx a lot, i had an awk script that wrote the table in my file from a CSV. Also, now i think most data inspection tools (panda and mysql at least, probably others) spit their data in the terminal in markdown form, so its a cpy pasta anyway. the only issue with markdown is image alignment. And to be honest, WYSIWYG editors are shit at this too. I'd rather not loose my time.
      - WolfOliver 4y ago
        yes, for image alignment latex is best. Sometimes the result is not perfect, but at least you do not have to think about it.
    - omaranto 4y ago
      > It's just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor. Try writing a table in Emacs Org Mode before you say that!
- ketzu 4y ago
  There are also the multitude of people that use markdown in chat applications, which usually implement a form of WYSIWYG editing, e.g., Slack.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after -<Space>.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.
      - chrismorgan 4y ago
        Because it’s still not Markdown, not by a long shot. https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics may call it “mrkdwn”, but it bears only a very superficial resemblance to Markdown—in significant chunks it’s closer to one or two other lightweight markup languages than to Markdown.
      - Fishkins 4y ago
        Have you tried recently? There was a period when I also had WYSIWYG enabled solely because markdown links weren't working for me, but that's been fixed (at least for me) for a while now.
    - ycombobreaker 4y ago
      Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.
- d12bb 4y ago
  I don't know all of your mentioned apps that well, but the ones I know just hide the markdown and provide shortcuts and buttons to insert it. I for one almost never use the shortcuts or syntax insertion buttons in Bear, instead writing like I would in notepad.exe and enjoying the clean looks. I guess one could call that kind of hybrid between WYSIWYG and plain text…
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I agree about Obsidian. But Ulysses in my experience isn't WYSIWYG, it's mostly syntax highlighting.
chrismorgan 4y ago
Your first two points are misleading: 1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places. Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not just a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used ![alt text](href) for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically. 2. The source quotation was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.
- prepend 4y ago
  I make markdown tables by hand. Very simple ones. And simple is good. Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” There are lots of tables in markdown. I’m not sure how you definitively know if they are made by hand or cut and pasted from a helper tool. Anyway, it’s a dumb argument to make. The beauty of markdown is that if you don’t understand something, just don’t use it. It’s not like there are many tables in blog posts or comments any way.
  - User23 4y ago
    > Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” You know exactly what the intended meaning is, because it’s a common idiom. For example, “nobody goes there anymore.” This is pseudopedantry just like intentionally misinterpreting phrases of the form “this or that” as nonexclusive disjunctions is. It can be used humorously, but taken seriously it’s just tiresome.
    - tanseydavid 4y ago
      I have to disagree strongly with this response. I do not think the post you are replying to, intended any sort of humor and I also think they made a correct and important point. I would have posted if they had not already done so.
ZiiS 4y ago
If you include Slack's Markdoon then they default to the WYSIWYG editor so probably > 1%.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  Slack has nothing to do with Markdown. The plain text that its text box turns into formatting bears no meaningful resemblance whatsoever (it’s more similar to some other lightweight markup languages, and really it’s just completely its own thing), and you mostly can’t interact with it in that format anyway. (See also https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting.)
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    The page you linked says "This formatting is similar to Markdown markup" so it has something to do with it. Given paragraphs, quotes, lists, and code are interchangeable it is certainly regrettably that links, bold, and italic are different but *bold* vs **bold** is still a meaningful resemblance in my book.
    - chrismorgan 4y ago
      Similarities: _…_ for italics, `…` for code, ```…``` for multiline code (… though this is an unofficial syntax not part of Markdown, though it’s very close to ubiquitous), <…> for delimiting URLs, a > prefix for quotes (which is the most common syntax by far, since it was established decades earlier in email), and entity-encoding of &, < and > for some reason (which, given that they don’t support any other entity-encoding, and don’t use the ampersand, and don’t support escaping any of the rest of the syntax, is all-round weird, like although they weren’t actually following Markdown anywhere else they decided to in this one place for some reason and made a total hash of it). The only similarities that are not extremely common conventions independent of any specific lightweight markup language are triple-backtick code fences, and entity-encoding. Differences: no paragraphs, line breaks are hard rather than soft breaks, *…* for bold (in Markdown that’s italics, and **…** or __…__ is bold), lists (apparently this syntax doesn’t actually support lists, driving home how this isn’t even Slack’s “normal” format—I’m not sure how lists are actually implemented, given that you can produce them in the web UI), links, strikethrough, emojification, and all the other stuff from Markdown that’s missing (including any other form of escaping or entity-encoding). Seriously, the resemblance is very superficial. The name is the part that’s closest, by a considerable margin; not the actual language. They say “similar to Markdown” because that’s the best-known lightweight markup language, so it’s the obvious reference point.
virtualritz 4y ago
> Markdown will never get beyond developers. My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'. We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option. I also used git to manage changes. This was 2009. He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document. Fast forward to today. My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard). Not in LaTex but in Markdown. It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time. It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though). I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after. Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges. After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me. I think there is a business opportunity here. Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.
- WolfOliver 4y ago
  have you tried monsterwriter? - It is a what you see is what you mean editor - It supports some markdown annotations to support your writing flow - it exports in LaTeX, Markdown - It creates a PDF based on LaTeX and allows to choose a template with some configurations
- Avshalom 4y ago
  >>My partner is writing her PhD thesis [...] in Markdown. Is she though? Markdown doesn't even have image captions or like support for citations.
  - another_devy 4y ago
    I think you if you use something like pandoc it allows to at markups for centering and citation refs, which I'm guessing was used for .md => .tex to .pdf. But they will be rendered plain text in makrdown preview
chopin 4y ago
> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. Afaik GitHub and Stackoverflow use markdown WYSIWYG editors. That'd cover a big chunk of users.
- mcluck 4y ago
  You're incorrect. They include buttons for generating some markdown and a separate preview option but at the end of the day, people are writing markdown. I feel pretty certain that most people who use either of those tools regularly eventually learn the syntax and just type it out because it's faster
maximus-decimus 4y ago
> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  Ah, I see that now, Source Mode vs Live Preview. But either way you're not using a toolbar and mouse for basic formatting and it's not hiding invisible control codes from you as you edit like in a standard WYSIWYG editor. The sort of things that make Word documents so hard to edit. Even in Live Preview mode, every character is visible when the cursor is in the area.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> > Markdown will never get beyond developers I mean here we are using markdown in hacker news comments where there won't even be any formatting. But before "new reddit", everyone was using Markdown in reddit as well. And no, not everyone who uses reddit is a programmer
FinnKuhn 4y ago
>Markdown will never get beyond developers. considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.

threatofrain 4y ago

> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. > Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.

Pereza0 4y ago
There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mpweiher 4y ago
> the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do. Which is kind of the point.
- WolfOliver 4y ago
  then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.
  - orwin 4y ago
    No, but there is fun ways to do it. when i used Latx a lot, i had an awk script that wrote the table in my file from a CSV. Also, now i think most data inspection tools (panda and mysql at least, probably others) spit their data in the terminal in markdown form, so its a cpy pasta anyway. the only issue with markdown is image alignment. And to be honest, WYSIWYG editors are shit at this too. I'd rather not loose my time.
    - WolfOliver 4y ago
      yes, for image alignment latex is best. Sometimes the result is not perfect, but at least you do not have to think about it.
  - omaranto 4y ago
    > It's just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor. Try writing a table in Emacs Org Mode before you say that!
ketzu 4y ago
There are also the multitude of people that use markdown in chat applications, which usually implement a form of WYSIWYG editing, e.g., Slack.
- kevincox 4y ago
  Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after -<Space>.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.
    - chrismorgan 4y ago
      Because it’s still not Markdown, not by a long shot. https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics may call it “mrkdwn”, but it bears only a very superficial resemblance to Markdown—in significant chunks it’s closer to one or two other lightweight markup languages than to Markdown.
    - Fishkins 4y ago
      Have you tried recently? There was a period when I also had WYSIWYG enabled solely because markdown links weren't working for me, but that's been fixed (at least for me) for a while now.
  - ycombobreaker 4y ago
    Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.
d12bb 4y ago
I don't know all of your mentioned apps that well, but the ones I know just hide the markdown and provide shortcuts and buttons to insert it. I for one almost never use the shortcuts or syntax insertion buttons in Bear, instead writing like I would in notepad.exe and enjoying the clean looks. I guess one could call that kind of hybrid between WYSIWYG and plain text…
D13Fd 4y ago
I agree about Obsidian. But Ulysses in my experience isn't WYSIWYG, it's mostly syntax highlighting.

chrismorgan 4y ago

Your first two points are misleading: 1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places. Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not just a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used ![alt text](href) for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically. 2. The source quotation was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.

prepend 4y ago
I make markdown tables by hand. Very simple ones. And simple is good. Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” There are lots of tables in markdown. I’m not sure how you definitively know if they are made by hand or cut and pasted from a helper tool. Anyway, it’s a dumb argument to make. The beauty of markdown is that if you don’t understand something, just don’t use it. It’s not like there are many tables in blog posts or comments any way.
- User23 4y ago
  > Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” You know exactly what the intended meaning is, because it’s a common idiom. For example, “nobody goes there anymore.” This is pseudopedantry just like intentionally misinterpreting phrases of the form “this or that” as nonexclusive disjunctions is. It can be used humorously, but taken seriously it’s just tiresome.
  - tanseydavid 4y ago
    I have to disagree strongly with this response. I do not think the post you are replying to, intended any sort of humor and I also think they made a correct and important point. I would have posted if they had not already done so.

ZiiS 4y ago

If you include Slack's Markdoon then they default to the WYSIWYG editor so probably > 1%.

chrismorgan 4y ago
Slack has nothing to do with Markdown. The plain text that its text box turns into formatting bears no meaningful resemblance whatsoever (it’s more similar to some other lightweight markup languages, and really it’s just completely its own thing), and you mostly can’t interact with it in that format anyway. (See also https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting.)
- ZiiS 4y ago
  The page you linked says "This formatting is similar to Markdown markup" so it has something to do with it. Given paragraphs, quotes, lists, and code are interchangeable it is certainly regrettably that links, bold, and italic are different but *bold* vs **bold** is still a meaningful resemblance in my book.
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    Similarities: _…_ for italics, `…` for code, ```…``` for multiline code (… though this is an unofficial syntax not part of Markdown, though it’s very close to ubiquitous), <…> for delimiting URLs, a > prefix for quotes (which is the most common syntax by far, since it was established decades earlier in email), and entity-encoding of &, < and > for some reason (which, given that they don’t support any other entity-encoding, and don’t use the ampersand, and don’t support escaping any of the rest of the syntax, is all-round weird, like although they weren’t actually following Markdown anywhere else they decided to in this one place for some reason and made a total hash of it). The only similarities that are not extremely common conventions independent of any specific lightweight markup language are triple-backtick code fences, and entity-encoding. Differences: no paragraphs, line breaks are hard rather than soft breaks, *…* for bold (in Markdown that’s italics, and **…** or __…__ is bold), lists (apparently this syntax doesn’t actually support lists, driving home how this isn’t even Slack’s “normal” format—I’m not sure how lists are actually implemented, given that you can produce them in the web UI), links, strikethrough, emojification, and all the other stuff from Markdown that’s missing (including any other form of escaping or entity-encoding). Seriously, the resemblance is very superficial. The name is the part that’s closest, by a considerable margin; not the actual language. They say “similar to Markdown” because that’s the best-known lightweight markup language, so it’s the obvious reference point.

virtualritz 4y ago

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'. We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option. I also used git to manage changes. This was 2009. He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document. Fast forward to today. My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard). Not in LaTex but in Markdown. It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time. It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though). I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after. Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges. After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me. I think there is a business opportunity here. Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.

WolfOliver 4y ago
have you tried monsterwriter? - It is a what you see is what you mean editor - It supports some markdown annotations to support your writing flow - it exports in LaTeX, Markdown - It creates a PDF based on LaTeX and allows to choose a template with some configurations
Avshalom 4y ago
>>My partner is writing her PhD thesis [...] in Markdown. Is she though? Markdown doesn't even have image captions or like support for citations.
- another_devy 4y ago
  I think you if you use something like pandoc it allows to at markups for centering and citation refs, which I'm guessing was used for .md => .tex to .pdf. But they will be rendered plain text in makrdown preview

chopin 4y ago

> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. Afaik GitHub and Stackoverflow use markdown WYSIWYG editors. That'd cover a big chunk of users.

mcluck 4y ago
You're incorrect. They include buttons for generating some markdown and a separate preview option but at the end of the day, people are writing markdown. I feel pretty certain that most people who use either of those tools regularly eventually learn the syntax and just type it out because it's faster

maximus-decimus 4y ago

> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG

Falkon1313 4y ago
Ah, I see that now, Source Mode vs Live Preview. But either way you're not using a toolbar and mouse for basic formatting and it's not hiding invisible control codes from you as you edit like in a standard WYSIWYG editor. The sort of things that make Word documents so hard to edit. Even in Live Preview mode, every character is visible when the cursor is in the area.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

> > Markdown will never get beyond developers I mean here we are using markdown in hacker news comments where there won't even be any formatting. But before "new reddit", everyone was using Markdown in reddit as well. And no, not everyone who uses reddit is a programmer

FinnKuhn 4y ago

>Markdown will never get beyond developers. considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.