4 ms·
I never realized the problem with markup until that phrase "light markup". The problem is that it's designed for a human to edit it by hand with a text editor.
by 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
I never realized the problem with markup until that phrase "light markup". The problem is that it's designed for a human to edit it by hand with a text editor. It's a programmer designing for a programmer, rather than for a user. It's a plumber designing a sink. A mechanic designing a radio. A busboy designing tableware.
What we should have instead of markup, is a WYSIWYG with keyboard shortcuts. Confluence, for example, will convert Markdown into rich text in real time, and has keyboard shortcuts for its other layout/style options. But the point is to edit it in a GUI, see your changes live, and not need to learn a language in order to edit a document. There are so many problems you avoid by giving the user tools to make their life easier. Markup may be one tiny part of that, but it shouldn't be considered the complete solution.
- civopsec 4y agoInterestingly though in this case it’s an amateur programmer (since being a professor of philosophy is his day job).
- nerpderp82 4y agoThe amateur programmer in this case switched from Haskell to Lua. Interesting.
- simonmic 4y agoI doubt it's that. Rather, you can write easy-to-install pandoc plugins in Lua, so prototyping with it makes a lot of sense. https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html https://pandoc.org/custom-readers.html https://pandoc.org/custom-writers.html https://pandoc.org/custom-writers.html
- nequo 4y ago> say, by clicking on the display itself, clicking "Menu -> Layout -> Options" selecting the layout we want, and seeing it displayed immediately Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying. Isn’t this the same as LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word? What is the existing problem that such an interface would solve?
- miohtama 4y agoFor some of the best WYSIWYG Markdown, see ProseMirror editor: https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/ https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/ From all web editors and their HTML transformations, ProseMirror has proven to be most sane for me.
- bityard 4y agoI very much enjoy being able to type up my documents and notes with just a little bit of syntactic sugar in ANY text editor on any OS, instead of having to move my mouse over to the "make a bullet list" icon, or having to memorize a dozen keyboard shortcuts. I suspect I am not alone.
- orangea 4y agoThis is a popular opinion and there are tons of implementations of WYSIWYG text editors such as Typora and Obsidian that attempt to make their data model simple like Markdown. But they all kind of suck, which shows that making that kind of editor is really hard.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoHow does Typora suck?