4 ms·

Is it meant to be? The appeal of Markdown is that it's easy to remember, reasonably friendly to non-technical people, and it looks good as plain text.

codetrotter 3y ago
It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural. Much more natural than for example html or even bbcode, when you are typing out text.
- proser 3y ago
  Markdown is an authoring language (it's easy to write) rather than a publishing language (like XML, which is mostly replaces, which sucks to write in).
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    That’s a perfect way to put it! :)
- stunpix 3y ago
  > It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural. If you are solely an English writer then yes. Using md with some languages will quickly turn you into its hater. Certain formatting symbols aren’t easily accessible in some layouts, like backticks for code or ^ for superscript. Some symbols require extra keystrokes like ~ in german. Some layouts will require finger yoga exercises. Basically, any other text markups based on English (including LaTeX) are unfriendly to other languages. Thus an abnormal popularity of md across the apps makes them much less friendly for non-English users. Mobile typing pushes this pain to another level.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Yeah. My native language has some very awkward placements of certain symbols as well actually. But I chose to sacrifice the letters æ, ø, å years ago by switching to using US-based layouts on my computers. Sometimes I use Dvorak layouts (even have a custom one I made for my mechanical keyboard that I sometimes use). Most of the time I write on a computer in recent years has been using the keyboard on my MacBook Pro computers with just US QWERTY. I very rarely type anything in my native tongue on the computers. Mainly just on the phone. And I am 97% sure that the times I need æ ø å on my macOS laptops I can long-press or option click some of the related characters like a and o. For a while, when I originally switched away from my native language QWERTY variant, I would sometimes need æ ø å on the computer and I would Google aelig oslash and aring respectively and find the symbols for those letters that way :p
kazinator 3y ago
Likewise, asciiflow.com serves something that isn't a good, or even half-decent graphics package for diagramming. Yet, I had to crank out diagrams recently, and found every single program I knew had become enshittified to the point of not being usable. I got the job done with asciiflow box-and-arrow diagrams, pasted into a word processing document as monospaced-font paragraphs.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  I like https://mermaid.live https://mermaid.live if https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is not an option.
jameshart 3y ago
It’s even more than that - it’s a codification of plain text formatting conventions. If you write a plain text document and you format it following markdown principles, you get a simple rich text version of your document for free. Your headings will be headings, your bullet points will be bullet points, and your code blocks will be code blocks. Now, you can also ‘game’ markdown, writing the minimum possible plaintext to ‘trick’ it into making a pretty document while leaving the plain text ugly. But in general, the idea of markdown is to start from ‘imagine I have a bunch of plain text files I’ve been formatting consistently for years. How can I make them look nice as rich text?’
- tombert 3y ago
  I was about to say; even before I knew markdown, I was using a lot of its conventions informally. I was using # to denote headers, and surrounding things with asterisks to emphasize them, using > to denote quotes. When I found out about markdown, it took me about ten minutes to learn because it was stuff I was largely already doing.
wpietri 3y ago
For sure. I'd call it an excellent bad markup language. I use LogSeq daily and as a practical matter I much prefer Markdown to, say, Evernote's WYSIWYG approach, which was more of a pain to use and left me with notes so broken that they are impossible to fix. Or to this author's theoretically better system HTML, because it's more of a pain to write. Basically Markdown cares about formatting about as much as I do, which is barely. I'll note this tension has a long history in CS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better And I think it has a lot to do with a very particular notion of good, which is something like "conceptually pleasing to someone who has mastered the space".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mmcclure 3y ago
So much this. I think I must be missing something here about the context here, but even then I think it's extremely hyperbolic for the author to make the leap from "I don't like Markdown for [x]" to "Markdown is objectively bad and should never be used in any context." Just look at some of these other examples the author lauds. I've been writing code for most of my life and I find roff's manpage to be absolutely inscrutable. I don't understand the context in which you'd need to pick between roff and Markdown, they seem like they're solving completely different problems for totally different audiences.

codetrotter 3y ago

It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural. Much more natural than for example html or even bbcode, when you are typing out text.

proser 3y ago
Markdown is an authoring language (it's easy to write) rather than a publishing language (like XML, which is mostly replaces, which sucks to write in).
- codetrotter 3y ago
  That’s a perfect way to put it! :)
stunpix 3y ago
> It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural. If you are solely an English writer then yes. Using md with some languages will quickly turn you into its hater. Certain formatting symbols aren’t easily accessible in some layouts, like backticks for code or ^ for superscript. Some symbols require extra keystrokes like ~ in german. Some layouts will require finger yoga exercises. Basically, any other text markups based on English (including LaTeX) are unfriendly to other languages. Thus an abnormal popularity of md across the apps makes them much less friendly for non-English users. Mobile typing pushes this pain to another level.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Yeah. My native language has some very awkward placements of certain symbols as well actually. But I chose to sacrifice the letters æ, ø, å years ago by switching to using US-based layouts on my computers. Sometimes I use Dvorak layouts (even have a custom one I made for my mechanical keyboard that I sometimes use). Most of the time I write on a computer in recent years has been using the keyboard on my MacBook Pro computers with just US QWERTY. I very rarely type anything in my native tongue on the computers. Mainly just on the phone. And I am 97% sure that the times I need æ ø å on my macOS laptops I can long-press or option click some of the related characters like a and o. For a while, when I originally switched away from my native language QWERTY variant, I would sometimes need æ ø å on the computer and I would Google aelig oslash and aring respectively and find the symbols for those letters that way :p

kazinator 3y ago

Likewise, asciiflow.com serves something that isn't a good, or even half-decent graphics package for diagramming. Yet, I had to crank out diagrams recently, and found every single program I knew had become enshittified to the point of not being usable. I got the job done with asciiflow box-and-arrow diagrams, pasted into a word processing document as monospaced-font paragraphs.

anotherhue 3y ago
I like https://mermaid.live https://mermaid.live if https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is not an option.

jameshart 3y ago

It’s even more than that - it’s a codification of plain text formatting conventions. If you write a plain text document and you format it following markdown principles, you get a simple rich text version of your document for free. Your headings will be headings, your bullet points will be bullet points, and your code blocks will be code blocks. Now, you can also ‘game’ markdown, writing the minimum possible plaintext to ‘trick’ it into making a pretty document while leaving the plain text ugly. But in general, the idea of markdown is to start from ‘imagine I have a bunch of plain text files I’ve been formatting consistently for years. How can I make them look nice as rich text?’

tombert 3y ago
I was about to say; even before I knew markdown, I was using a lot of its conventions informally. I was using # to denote headers, and surrounding things with asterisks to emphasize them, using > to denote quotes. When I found out about markdown, it took me about ten minutes to learn because it was stuff I was largely already doing.

wpietri 3y ago

For sure. I'd call it an excellent bad markup language. I use LogSeq daily and as a practical matter I much prefer Markdown to, say, Evernote's WYSIWYG approach, which was more of a pain to use and left me with notes so broken that they are impossible to fix. Or to this author's theoretically better system HTML, because it's more of a pain to write. Basically Markdown cares about formatting about as much as I do, which is barely. I'll note this tension has a long history in CS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better And I think it has a lot to do with a very particular notion of good, which is something like "conceptually pleasing to someone who has mastered the space".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mmcclure 3y ago

So much this. I think I must be missing something here about the context here, but even then I think it's extremely hyperbolic for the author to make the leap from "I don't like Markdown for [x]" to "Markdown is objectively bad and should never be used in any context." Just look at some of these other examples the author lauds. I've been writing code for most of my life and I find roff's manpage to be absolutely inscrutable. I don't understand the context in which you'd need to pick between roff and Markdown, they seem like they're solving completely different problems for totally different audiences.