14 ms·

Markdown is meant to be shown (2021)

204 points by SoKamil 2y ago

tjoff 2y ago
Though only show the markdown if one is expected to edit it (which would be the case in an editor). Otherwise, if the usecase is consumption you are better to show the generated output.
- filcuk 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm happy I can edit via markdown and fallback on it if the site is down, for example, but I see no benefit to intentionally making it less readable when reading/presenting.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  Yes, the blog post could have made it clearer that the author was talking about editing mode only. (His wording was “meant to be visible to the writer”.) The issue, of course, is when the writer is also the reader, such as for the note-taking apps. It’s not always clear then what mode the user wants to be in. I’m pretty happy with the compromise struck by Bear, which does some of what the author is complaining about. Bear’s technique is to show the formatting (i.e., hide the markdown syntax) for everything except the “word” (contiguous non-white-space) that you are currently editing, as determined by the location of your cursor. This lets you edit the markdown directly, ASCII-character-by-ASCII-character, but the rest of the doc looks pretty. It’s not perfect, but hiccups are rare and I find it vastly better than the alternatives: (1) a conventional WYSIWYG editor or (2) a hard distinction between writing and reading mode that the user needs to constantly toggle actively as they use their notes. But it seems fine to me that different users prefer any of these options.
deafpolygon 2y ago
I prefer not to see the markdown, and only the styling. We used to have a smattering of RTF-styled notetakong apps until they all became markdown-backed ones. It’s telling that they’re hiding the Markdown. People don’t want to see it.
Y-bar 2y ago
I am currently trying to fit Obsidian into my workflow as a note taking app, and this is one of my main gripes about the app. Another being that it does not integrate well with the operating system spell checking, so adding a word elsewhere to the system dictionary does not reflect in Obsidian, and the other way around.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  Obsidian has both live preview and source mode. I have a shortcut to switch between the two. I use live preview when making lists and source mode for most other documents.
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    I’ve been scouring the preferences pane once again but can’t find anything like it. Any tips?
    - LordDragonfang 2y ago
      Settings > Editor > Default editing mode Switch the dropdown from "Live preview" to "Source mode"
    - bachmeier 2y ago
      The other commenter has given you the way to set the default. Just go with that if you never want live preview. My keyboard shortcut is in Settings > Hotkeys > Toggle Live Preview/Source Mode. I set that to Alt P. You can also click the three dots in the upper right corner and select source mode.
- replete 2y ago
  I use a keyboard shortcut to quickly switch between source and live preview mode. I open sourced my css snippets repo, and the first CSS rule in this file in my minimal theme CSS snippets repo resets font sizes in source view so font sizes are the all the same: https://github.com/replete/obsidian-minimal-theme-css-snippets/blob/main/%5Beditor%5D%20Typography%20fixes.css https://github.com/replete/obsidian-minimal-theme-css-snippe...
gsinclair 2y ago
Grover thinks the purpose of Markdown is that the author knows what HTML tags will be generated. That was his purpose, but it’s long outgrown that!
hoosieree 2y ago
Probably easier to get people to change the name from README.md to RENDERME.md.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
msf1024 2y ago
The reason I write in markdown is because it is fast and keyboard-driven. I don't want to see it when I'm looking at my notes or editing them. The idea that it is meant to be seen is no more than a personal preference.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  But uh, how do you undo the styling from the keyboard? Does Backspace turn "italic" into "*italic"?
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    I've seen editors do it that way, and if you know what it looks like in your head, it works quite well, IMO. I can't imagine how it works for people who aren't pretty good at the syntax.
  - ixwt 2y ago
    I personally like the way that Obsidian and Typora hide the styling: when you get to where it would be, it shows up on screen to show you it's there causing the styling. When your typing indicator moves away from it, it hides it. Some don't like it because it can cause some displacement of text a bit because it's now showing characters it didn't before.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      I found Obsidian’s way of doing it to be a bit jarring at first but now that I’ve used it for awhile I personally quite like it. Just takes a little while of getting used to
    - cnity 2y ago
      You could probably do this in a way that doesn't trigger text reflow if a popover appeared with the visible syntax exactly positioned such that the extra syntax slightly obscured surrounding text. It's a tradeoff but I think that might be slicker.
    - Sylamore 2y ago
phone8675309 2y ago
> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown, but my understanding is that the whole point of it is to provide a syntax where the most common HTML tags for prose can be replaced by simple punctuation characters that are meant to be visible to the writer. Cracking up at this quote
- dpritchett 2y ago
  The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!
  - keybored 2y ago
    > The deadpan Based on his interaction with the CommonMark people I would characterize it more as overly possessive.
    - Y-bar 2y ago
      I bet, if I would take your copyrighted work, create a deritative work, have the gall to call it "Standard YourCopyrightedWork", and then go back and forth if it is a derivative work or not, you would certainly not consider me friendly either. As someone who contributed a bit to the early CommonMark spec I think some of us were really doing it the shitty way towards Gruber. How would the Rust people react if we created a "Standard Rust" language?
      - LordDragonfang 2y ago
        > if I would take your copyrighted work https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ >Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. John Gruber's markdown is unmaintained (last updated in 2004), free software, which many people have contributed to to fix oversights and extend its capabilities. This is exactly how fsf is supposed to work.
zeveb 2y ago
I think that this is correct. Also, we really shouldn’t forget that Markdown is meant to generate HTML, and that HTML blocks are valid Markdown: a system which does not permit it isn’t really using Markdown.
jareklupinski 2y ago
put a "Show Markdown / Show Result" toggle button at the top of the textbox that contains the editable field save the current setting to a cookie some people who stay on the rendered side sometimes forget the syntax, and use the Show Markdown button to check how something was created
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Someone please tell Atlassian who are about to disable this for trello desktop.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Does anyone prefer the syntax view when in read-only mode? I don't think I'd ever prefer seeing raw markdown over rendered documents when browsing GitHub repositories for example.
  - jareklupinski 2y ago
    i think it's like an HTML browser at that point: content creators and power users might want to check the code for a typo or hint, some people copying a section of text want to be sure they are copying the code also and not just the text (or vice versa)
voidhorse 2y ago
I think the bigger problem is that apps that don't need/shouldn't use markdown reach for it as a default and build upon it when they would have been served better investing in richer markup. Take ulysses (mentioned in the article) for example. It has grown into a full-fledged writing and word processing application, but its being based on markdown originally has only hampered that. They've had to implement all of these clunky extensions and features in terms of markdown, and as the post states, try to hide the fact that it's all markdown to make it feel more like a classic word processor. At this point it just makes the whole experience clunky. People that just want to write markdown deal with weird extensions and frustrating syntax hiding, people that don't need to learn some minimal markdown just to use a word processor... It's 2024. I hope companies start to realize that markdown is a fantastic solution for certain cases but it is not the only solution. Some applications really are better served by more complex, but much more expressive markup languages, especially if they are going to shield the user from it all anyways.
- jasonpbecker 2y ago
  Of course you can use any number of ways to implement rich text or formatting. A lot of people want Markdown because of the portability of plain text. Markdown has served as a good mechanism for plain text formats that still can do a bit more. Ulysses would lose a significant portion of its audience if it moved to it's own syntax or some form of rich text or its own binary. A new audience would likely become interested-- though fighting Microsoft Word is ... hard to say the least. Maybe that's where Ulysses wants to go, and its own implementation of some non-standard elements suggests that. But I also know people who will not use Ulysses because of its non-standard Markdown elements resulting in files that are less portable.
- sbuttgereit 2y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I find that I'll choose Markdown (assuming it's a choice) when I expect multi-modal consumption... where a given text will in some contexts simply be presented as-is using plain text and the text can also take advantage of rendering into a more styled presentation. I write in-database comments (e.g. PostgreSQL's `COMMENT ON [...]`) using Markdown for this reason. My go-to database documentation tool of choice (https://schemaspy.org https://schemaspy.org) will very nicely render the Markdown into styled documentation integrated into the rest of the documentation it generates, but the plain text rendering when I'm looking at those same comments via `psql`, where no Markdown rendering is applied, still look decent due to how Markdown works.
ericyd 2y ago
> Trust me, it’s meant to be shown. Maybe it's time to accept that this thing you created is bigger than yourself and it's future is not in your hands.
gkoberger 2y ago
One thing I love about being able to see the syntax when editing is that you know what's about to happen. A backspace will always delete the previous key; you won't end up in a situation where you're deleting a whole block of content. And when you type, you know if the cursor is on the left or right side of the "*", whereas in WYSIWYG it could be on either side of the invisible change from bold to regular. It's much more relaxing for me to write in Markdown, because I don't have to think about the mode I'm in or how to get out of a small pickle. Everything is just a character. I don't think Markdown is for everything. Microsoft Word is not a Markdown editor, and most people are better served by a WYSIWYG editor. But for writing content, I always prefer personally to write in markdown (and to see the syntax), since it's easier to focus more on writing and less on the editor.
- ximm 2y ago
  You haven't dealt with bidirectional text yet, have you?
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    I feel like that's a hard problem no matter what, and doesn't negate my personal preference for using markdown when writing longform content?
- svachalek 2y ago
  The thing where backspace magically reformats half your document is so frustrating. I wonder if Word's solved it as it's been decades since I've used that, but it seems like pretty much anything else I use still has that issue.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  This is giving me strong WordPerfect 5.1 Reveal Codes vibes.
bitwize 2y ago
Maybe it's time we brought back the "Reveal Codes" command?
slightwinder 2y ago
But syntax is ugly, especially the more complex parts we have now. And I think some of them, like tables, code blocks or modern link-style, weren't even part of the original markdown. And the reason I prefer Markdown, is because it's not proprietary, and Obsidian, my preferred Markdown-Tool, has a different workflow than the usual WYSIWYG-Tools. If Obsidian would use json or yaml for everything, I would still use it. It's just a tool for me, not the goal.
thomascgalvin 2y ago
I generally don't even like syntax highlighting for Markdown. I find having the text jump around because it became bold or italicized distracting, and it's even worse when a header is suddenly a larger size and everything below it is pushed down the screen. Markdown is simple, and I like working with it simply. I suppose there is some value in having the more complicated aspects, like images and tables, checked for syntax so you can see if you've made a mistake, but I run a macro to generate those anyway, so I'm fairly confident in the result.
- diwank 2y ago
  Yep but to me this feels like a lot of poor ux decisions too. I would def appreciate the visual indicators of italics and bold text but ffsake please dont toggle it every time I add a bloody keystroke. It's so jarring when editors do that. There are so many alternative designs where you can have both. For instance, on my vim the highlights only get added/removed when I switch back to normal mode, during editing nothing changes except for the actual keystrokes.
bfung 2y ago
> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown… Says the inventor of it, 20yrs ago. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
- hungie 2y ago
  Inventing a thing and understanding a thing aren't necessarily the same. We adopt technologies and make them our own, sometimes away from the inventor's initial vision. I think if people, by and large, enjoy markdown one way (for example in this forum, where you italicize text but the control characters don't show), then maybe the inventor is wrong. Or is right about their preferences but shouldn't try to make their preferences the de facto standard.
  - breadwinner 2y ago
    The best example of that is Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, predicting the collapse of Ethernet... didn't happen. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/azevs3/til_that_ethernet_inventor_robert_metcalfe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/azevs3/til_t...
    - gowld 2y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/msg00192.html https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit.... > Of course you should understand that I ate the column only because the Internet, as far as I can tell, did not suffer a gigalapse during 1996 -- a billion lost user*hours in a single outage. The Internet has indeed bogged down (hit STOP much?) and has indeed suffered large outages (the biggest being a 118 megalapse at AOL in August) He was only wrong by a factor of 9.
  - natpalmer1776 2y ago
    I think the author of the blog post intended the comment as a tongue-in-cheek joke; A humble way of pointing out that they created markdown and thus have some degree of implicit authority when speaking on the subject.
timetraveller26 2y ago
It should be optional, hide by default (maybe like Obsidian where is only visible on the cursor's line) but add an option to make it always visible
red_admiral 2y ago
Trello, once made for developers by developers, has announced that some time this August they will disable the markdown editor on desktop and force you to use the WYSIWYG one. The markdown one will remain on mobile, so there's clearly no compelling reason to do this. There won't even be an opt-out anymore. (Could someone please find out which resources we all have to add to ublock to work around this?)
paradox460 2y ago
I'd prefer if we stopped using markdown all together, and moved to something like djot: https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot
- gkoberger 2y ago
  Maybe djot is better... I'm sure it is in a lot of ways. But one of the key features of Markdown (and, indeed, most tech such as programming langauges) is the ubiquity. It's really hard to overcome the fact that almost every platform can export/import markdown.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  Ignores newlines as well, so just as annoying as markdown to me. Why are almost all of those light formatters removing your line breaks? Everytime someone mentions some markdown variant (and there are many of them!) and I look up the syntax description, it shows that newlines are being ignored. If it's trying to be plain text, at least behave like plain text, and don't remove newlines in a shopping list like this (just like hacker news also does with its comments): -eggs -milk -flour -water BBCode has it right.
  - ulbu 2y ago
    I guess, because it works well with terminal text editors, emails, and other contexts where your text isn’t wrapped at a margin. which is most places.
    - Aardwolf 2y ago
      I'm mean ignoring single newlines that you enter, so it's wrapping less, not more
      - ulbu 2y ago
        you mean the newlines that make your text readable in those contexts I mentioned? :)
  - 2y ago
chrismorgan 2y ago
> If you want WYSIWYG, do WYSIWYG. If you want Markdown, show the Markdown. Trust me, it’s meant to be shown. One valuable thing about using Markdown as an data storage/exchange format is that it's often easier to manipulate; for example, diffs are normally going to be better, and content edits often easier. Mind you, a proper encoding of a WYSIWYG format, and corresponding tooling, will be better... but for quick-and-dirty that normally works well, Markdown is ultimately pretty good (unfortunately, in my opinion).
taeric 2y ago
Oh wow. From headline, I first thought this meant that viewing a markdown document should show me the markup. Which falls on its face with images and links, of course. No, this is about editing the document. And... I confess I'm confused on why folks would want the opposite? WYSIWYG is, of course, a thing and popular for many reasons. So, I can see having the option to operate in that way. But a huge benefit of markup languages of any kind is that I can see the markup. Fully agreed that I should be able to see it.
- thinkling 2y ago
  I use markdown for note-taking. I do as much reading as editing, and they're generally intertwined. I don't want to switch between "view mode" and "edit mode". I want to be able to embed links but not have the document become cluttered with long, ugly URLs. I want to use headlines and bulleted lists and have them auto-formatted. I also want to keep my notes in a 100% portable human-readable format. (No MS Word, no Bear, no Evernote, etc.) For my use, the best solution is an app that shows me the formatted (styled) output, until I navigate the insertion point into it, and then expands the text to show the formatting. Obsidian is an app that does this. I don't love other parts of it, but the editing experience works well. (What I really want is the search/browse experience of nvUltra with the editing experience and cross-platform presence of Obsidian.)
  - kragen 2y ago
    this only partially addresses your complaint, but you may or may not be aware that markdown has an option to put urls in footnotes, which you can put anywhere in the file: (This is part of the background work for [Monnier’s paper with him about Elisp’s history][3] for HOPL ’20.) ... [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386324 (Evolution of Emacs Lisp, by Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber) in my .emacs.d/init.el i wrote a command https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L230 https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e... which inserts such a footnote link, linking the previous word to the link pasted from the clipboard. it auto-increments the footnote counter, initially setting it higher than any numbered footnote it finds in the file. i have it bound to the fairly horrible key ctrl-alt-]; successive presses of the key expand the link leftwards to include more words (it ought to use the selection as the link text if there is one, and to find an existing block of footnotes to add the footnote to if there is one, but i haven't implemented those features) the upshot of this is that in the above, after typing 'history', i pressed ctrl-alt-] and kept pressing ] until the link had engulfed monnier's name emacs markdown-mode does also automatically syntax-highlight links, headers, bulleted lists, italic, bold, typewriter code, and markdown linebreaks, and it has a command (the also rather horrible keybinding ctrl-c ctrl-o) to open a link. if the link is to a local file, it opens it in emacs rather than your browser. it also uses the tab key to expand and collapse headers, and of course it always has emacs's instantaneous full-text search. but the formatting is much uglier than obsidian's
ides_dev 2y ago
This is precisely why I use Bear [0] (although Bear does hide the link URLs) and just cannot get on with Notion. The worse thing about editing in Notion (and other editors where the syntax is hidden) is trying to adjust `mono-space text`. It always seems to get confused about whether I'm inside the mono-space area or outside it and I end up making stuff mono-space that shouldn't be or vice versa. [0] https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/
- walthamstow 2y ago
  For me it's Zettlr on MacOS You can also set Slack to not render the markdown until the message is sent, which I would thoroughly recommend
iambateman 2y ago
Ahh, yes. I, as a developer, think Markdown is wonderful – simple even – so I use it all the time. It finds it's way into my applications and interfaces. The pure elegance is the stuff of dreams. Then I bring a client into their app for an onboarding meeting. When they see a bit of Markdown, they start to fidget, then sweat. "Will I be asked to perform these magic incantations?" they wonder. They feel a bit of queasiness but try to hold it back. Perhaps this will be ok. But, after about 10 minutes, I show them that `# Header` is how you make a header. Their disdain is now total...How dare I imply that a hashtag implies a header. This is hard. Then, I show them a link. "It's just like this", I say: `(https://example.com)[example https://example.com)[example link]`. "You'll get used to it." Finally, the client pounds his fists on the table. "That's CODING DAMMIT. WE PAID YOU TO DO THE CODING YOU *$$HOLE. I want it to be like...well...Microsoft Word." --- You see, my friends...the real problem here is that Microsoft Word is a nightmare but it is _the_ nightmare to which all other dreams are compared. And thus, sheepishly, I awaken, and install TinyMCE.
- haroldp 2y ago
 And now you have a new job: untangling garbage <a>HTML      </a> disasters and coaching your clients about keeping the text styles in alignment with the site branding. :)
 - iambateman 2y ago
 “Coaching clients to keep text styles aligned with the brand” should come with a trigger warning! :D
 - haroldp 2y ago
 It never does. It just LEAPS out at you on a Tuesday morning, stabbing at your eyes with pink, serif, all-caps. How about, "Coaching clients to ask for new DB fields instead of overloading existing ones?"
- kragen 2y ago
teo_zero 2y ago
When I edit a C program, comments are highlighted in a specific way, but the // characters are not removed. Why should editing a markdown text be different?
fenomas 2y ago
Related: given that markdown is meant to be read, it kind of drives me up the wall that some people nowadays run autoformatters like Prettier on it. Super-aggressive formatters like prettier remove various whitespace, and mangle other things that human authors do for readability. Which is fine if the file is something that's only ever meant to be parsed by scripts, but the whole point of markdown is that people read it! (edited to add: It wouldn't really be an issue if prettier had some config options for not mangling whitespace, but that ship seems to have sailed for some reason.)
- diwank 2y ago
 Yes! I sometimes prefer to use `====` h1s and `----` h2s especially when I am writing slides or taking notes on a live call for others and I hate that prettier and other linters would automatically turn them into `# ` and `## ` ... Please stop doing that, prettier.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
 Well, Markdown is a superset of HTML where extra whitespace is usually collapsed, so this behavior isn't surprising. Having "source" Markdown looking meaningfully different from the rendered Markdown seems like an anti-pattern.
 - Shog9 2y ago
 As the essay and this discussion repeatedly try to emphasize, thinking of Markdown as a "superset of HTML" is missing the point - it is meant to be read. It has both meaningful and collapsible whitespace, and both allows and encourages uses of whitespace that only have a significant effect on source readability. ...Arguably, the reason HTML has collapsible whitespace is to allow writing readable source, and once upon a time it was more common to see HTML produced in a way that didn't get in the way of this (e.g. paragraphs and indentation indicated primarily via whitespace with only opening `` and `<li>` tags). But that ship sailed; tooling long ago coalesced around more rigid conventions, and thus the need for Markdown emerged. Throwing those advantages away raises the question of why bother using Markdown at all.
kragen 2y ago
maybe as a compromise the markdown metacharacters should be displayed in a lighter-weight font, a smaller font, or a reduced-contrast color? then you can see them, so it isn't a mystery how to type them, but the visual noise they add to the text you're editing is minimal
eslaught 2y ago
I guess I'll defend the minority opinion. For context, I write over 100k words a year. That's something like 150 pages depending on how you format it. This includes both technical documents (which I mainly do in Latex) and more traditional long-form writing (which I do in Markdown). For technical documents, formatting is very much a key part of the presentation, so I want to see the markup. I mainly use Emacs and I render the PDF from the terminal when I want to see it. Fidelity to the final result is essential, so I don't bother with Latex IDEs (unless I'm doing collaborative editing on Overleaf). For my long-form writing, I want the markup to get out of the way. I use Markdown because it's simple and portable and generates a large number of formats (via Pandoc); that does NOT mean that I want the asterisks and hash signs and so on staring me in the face. Also, frankly, it's just easier to write when the text looks pretty. For most of this writing I write in Typora (with a nice variable-width font), and then edit in Emacs with the generated PDF side-by-side. Why bother with Markdown at all? Because Word ultimately gets in the way of me producing nice documents. The fact that I can move my cursor to see exactly what the markup is, and that this markup is simple and straightforward and maps well into what I'm trying to generate, helps me focus on content and avoid distractions. Word has far too many knobs, far too many ways to do something that looks visually correct but generates the wrong markup (especially when you're going to do post-processing in some other tool), and really hinders refactoring (when you need to make global style changes). So I use Markdown, but again, that doesn't mean I want markup staring me in the face. I'm not sure why people are so incredulous that this is a desirable goal? I mean it should be pretty obvious that the apps would not exist if there wasn't a market for it, so clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way.
verdverm 2y ago
There are some editors, like TipTap, that output a json object, even though they look like they could be markdown editors. This is my goto React Markdown editor, very solid out of the box and customizable in all sorts of ways https://uiwjs.github.io/react-md-editor/ https://uiwjs.github.io/react-md-editor/
Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
> I have no idea why there are now apps that use Markdown as their back end storage format but only show styled text without the Markdown source code visible. Because backend storage of rich text is not a solved problem? RTF is a horrid, over-complex serialisation. Some platforms have their own internal format for rich text (e.g. NSAttributedString) but serialisation is either lacking or platform-specific. Writing as WYSIWYG but storing in the backend as Markdown is not an insane idea, and I say that as someone whose muscle memory has been cmd-B/cmd-I since 1992 and would never choose to actually compose in Markdown unless I had to.
throwmeawaysire 2y ago
People say that Markdown is isomorphic to HTML but HTML has , , , and , while Markdown bold and italic almost always get transformed into and , right? According to MDN the HTML standard defines clearly very different semantics for the elements, although IIRC there was once a drive to move away from and as presentational, which is why people started using and instead but in a way as if they were presentational, kinda defeating the point. IDK, what do you think? ": The Bring Attention To element" ": The Idiomatic Text element" ": The Emphasis element" ": The Strong Importance element"
bastawhiz 2y ago
If you only care to expose limited formatting to the user, whether the file is stored in Markdown or not is immaterial. It could be stored in Word 2003 DOC format and export to Markdown, and if the serialization and deserialization are faithful, it doesn't matter at all. Markdown is portable, fast, safe, and simple. Being able to dump your data as Markdown (which you know works, because the Markdown version is the literal source of truth) means you're guaranteed to be able to extract your data and move it wherever you want with perfect fidelity. That's a huge bonus. The argument here is pointless if your concern isn't the syntax: Markdown _as a serialization format_ versus Markdown _as a typeable syntax_ are two separate concerns. The UX of a tool meant for editing Markdown is going to be extremely different than a tool to edit simple rich text. In my own app, I default to WYSIWYG with an option to edit the raw markdown (for podcast show notes, which have very limited formatting options). Why? Because the alternative is HTML and that sucks to write by hand (especially if you can't use most tags).
dogsledsleddog 2y ago
I think the don't do it if you are mixing, purist thinking cycles through for each UI and is generally pointless and doesn't serve people who take it up. All the rat poison oriented window managers also have a great point and the ones with no mouse support at all might be perfect for many but it is silly and counter productive not to provide the mouse support because it is an anti pattern and pretend that all the users who need to see the benefits of avoiding the anti pattern, and practice [not] using it, are going to somehow magically end up trying the purist UIs.
j1elo 2y ago
Before I learned the existence of Markdown, the intuitive most logical markup for me was (and after 10+ years of writing Markdown, still is): * *Asterisks* should be bold. Like WhatsApp and Slack do. Because they bring attention to the eye, marking a strong emphasis, and also because for italics there seem to be a much better alternative. * /Slash/ should be italics. Young me thought this was so obvious! Because italic text is leaning to the right, just like the slash bar. (Note that with time I ended up realizing that this would be a bad idea because slashes are too commonly used in plain written language. The parser would need to be too clever. But still, seemed nice for a while :-) * _Underscore_ should be underline. I mean, the name says it all. This is so obvious to me that I never understood how it's not the case. I had been writing _this_ to visualize an underlined word for so much time before learning Markdown, that having it for italics just feels strange. Anyway. If someone knows some resource about the thought process, discussions, or decisions that were made to adopt the current syntax (especially to decide that _underscore_ should italicize, which feels so strange) please let me know, I love reading about that kind of thing :)
- tasuki 2y ago
  In polite society, underlined text is not a thing. I'm with you wrt slash for italics, but sometimes you also just want to write a slash... how would you do that? Underscores are good because you never really want to display them...
  - indoordin0saur 2y ago
    If you're documenting technical things (what markdown is most commonly used for) underscores need to be displayed all the time because they are common in all sorts of resource and variable names.
    - j1elo 2y ago
      Just adding that for technical terms that include underscores, I am on the camp that most if not all of the times they should also be marked as such (as a technical identifier of something) with `backquotes`. Which solves the issue of having unexpected formatting. I agree, however, than my original naive idea of using slashes was not so good. Obviously some practice gives a better understanding of the problem, and nowadays I see it differently. The slash is too common in written language; it's actually a good thing that unintended italics are not introduced after writing some trivial slashed term in a text, such as "he/him".
preommr 2y ago
90% sure the reason is that new users, not familiar with the app, want to see that the change is actually taking place. Without it, the user may expect the post would literally be '*text*' instead of being bolded.
rubymamis 2y ago
> I have no idea why there are now apps that use Markdown as their back end storage format but only show styled text without the Markdown source code visible. The reason why we do in Plume[1] is simple - we want a WYSIWYG editor for our non-technical users, yet also the reassuring longevity of a plain text format such as Markdown. Simple as that. In my opinion, it's a combo that's hard to beat. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/
Vaslo 2y ago
I’ve run into this exact same issue with many of the self hosted wikis/tools. Some of the ones I had interest in like Trilium don’t have native support and you have to use a plug-in hack to see both the code and the preview, or you have to click back and forth between rendering and redoing. I just wouldn’t have markdown in my software if I wasn’t going to support a preview.
voltaireodactyl 2y ago
There’s a screenwriting markdown variant called fountain that has underlining and basically works perfectly for nearly any writing. Wish it were more widespread.

204 points by SoKamil 2y ago

Though only show the markdown if one is expected to edit it (which would be the case in an editor). Otherwise, if the usecase is consumption you are better to show the generated output.

filcuk 2y ago
Yeah, I'm happy I can edit via markdown and fallback on it if the site is down, for example, but I see no benefit to intentionally making it less readable when reading/presenting.
jessriedel 2y ago
Yes, the blog post could have made it clearer that the author was talking about editing mode only. (His wording was “meant to be visible to the writer”.) The issue, of course, is when the writer is also the reader, such as for the note-taking apps. It’s not always clear then what mode the user wants to be in. I’m pretty happy with the compromise struck by Bear, which does some of what the author is complaining about. Bear’s technique is to show the formatting (i.e., hide the markdown syntax) for everything except the “word” (contiguous non-white-space) that you are currently editing, as determined by the location of your cursor. This lets you edit the markdown directly, ASCII-character-by-ASCII-character, but the rest of the doc looks pretty. It’s not perfect, but hiccups are rare and I find it vastly better than the alternatives: (1) a conventional WYSIWYG editor or (2) a hard distinction between writing and reading mode that the user needs to constantly toggle actively as they use their notes. But it seems fine to me that different users prefer any of these options.

deafpolygon 2y ago

I prefer not to see the markdown, and only the styling. We used to have a smattering of RTF-styled notetakong apps until they all became markdown-backed ones. It’s telling that they’re hiding the Markdown. People don’t want to see it.

Y-bar 2y ago

I am currently trying to fit Obsidian into my workflow as a note taking app, and this is one of my main gripes about the app. Another being that it does not integrate well with the operating system spell checking, so adding a word elsewhere to the system dictionary does not reflect in Obsidian, and the other way around.

bachmeier 2y ago
Obsidian has both live preview and source mode. I have a shortcut to switch between the two. I use live preview when making lists and source mode for most other documents.
- Y-bar 2y ago
  I’ve been scouring the preferences pane once again but can’t find anything like it. Any tips?
  - LordDragonfang 2y ago
    Settings > Editor > Default editing mode Switch the dropdown from "Live preview" to "Source mode"
  - bachmeier 2y ago
    The other commenter has given you the way to set the default. Just go with that if you never want live preview. My keyboard shortcut is in Settings > Hotkeys > Toggle Live Preview/Source Mode. I set that to Alt P. You can also click the three dots in the upper right corner and select source mode.
replete 2y ago
I use a keyboard shortcut to quickly switch between source and live preview mode. I open sourced my css snippets repo, and the first CSS rule in this file in my minimal theme CSS snippets repo resets font sizes in source view so font sizes are the all the same: https://github.com/replete/obsidian-minimal-theme-css-snippets/blob/main/%5Beditor%5D%20Typography%20fixes.css https://github.com/replete/obsidian-minimal-theme-css-snippe...

gsinclair 2y ago

Grover thinks the purpose of Markdown is that the author knows what HTML tags will be generated. That was his purpose, but it’s long outgrown that!

hoosieree 2y ago

Probably easier to get people to change the name from README.md to RENDERME.md.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

msf1024 2y ago

The reason I write in markdown is because it is fast and keyboard-driven. I don't want to see it when I'm looking at my notes or editing them. The idea that it is meant to be seen is no more than a personal preference.

Joker_vD 2y ago
But uh, how do you undo the styling from the keyboard? Does Backspace turn "italic" into "*italic"?
- wccrawford 2y ago
  I've seen editors do it that way, and if you know what it looks like in your head, it works quite well, IMO. I can't imagine how it works for people who aren't pretty good at the syntax.
- ixwt 2y ago
  I personally like the way that Obsidian and Typora hide the styling: when you get to where it would be, it shows up on screen to show you it's there causing the styling. When your typing indicator moves away from it, it hides it. Some don't like it because it can cause some displacement of text a bit because it's now showing characters it didn't before.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    I found Obsidian’s way of doing it to be a bit jarring at first but now that I’ve used it for awhile I personally quite like it. Just takes a little while of getting used to
  - cnity 2y ago
    You could probably do this in a way that doesn't trigger text reflow if a popover appeared with the visible syntax exactly positioned such that the extra syntax slightly obscured surrounding text. It's a tradeoff but I think that might be slicker.
  - Sylamore 2y ago

phone8675309 2y ago

> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown, but my understanding is that the whole point of it is to provide a syntax where the most common HTML tags for prose can be replaced by simple punctuation characters that are meant to be visible to the writer. Cracking up at this quote

dpritchett 2y ago
The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!
- keybored 2y ago
  > The deadpan Based on his interaction with the CommonMark people I would characterize it more as overly possessive.
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    I bet, if I would take your copyrighted work, create a deritative work, have the gall to call it "Standard YourCopyrightedWork", and then go back and forth if it is a derivative work or not, you would certainly not consider me friendly either. As someone who contributed a bit to the early CommonMark spec I think some of us were really doing it the shitty way towards Gruber. How would the Rust people react if we created a "Standard Rust" language?
    - LordDragonfang 2y ago
      > if I would take your copyrighted work https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ >Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. John Gruber's markdown is unmaintained (last updated in 2004), free software, which many people have contributed to to fix oversights and extend its capabilities. This is exactly how fsf is supposed to work.

zeveb 2y ago

I think that this is correct. Also, we really shouldn’t forget that Markdown is meant to generate HTML, and that HTML blocks are valid Markdown: a system which does not permit it isn’t really using Markdown.

jareklupinski 2y ago

put a "Show Markdown / Show Result" toggle button at the top of the textbox that contains the editable field save the current setting to a cookie some people who stay on the rendered side sometimes forget the syntax, and use the Show Markdown button to check how something was created

red_admiral 2y ago
Someone please tell Atlassian who are about to disable this for trello desktop.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Does anyone prefer the syntax view when in read-only mode? I don't think I'd ever prefer seeing raw markdown over rendered documents when browsing GitHub repositories for example.
- jareklupinski 2y ago
  i think it's like an HTML browser at that point: content creators and power users might want to check the code for a typo or hint, some people copying a section of text want to be sure they are copying the code also and not just the text (or vice versa)

voidhorse 2y ago

I think the bigger problem is that apps that don't need/shouldn't use markdown reach for it as a default and build upon it when they would have been served better investing in richer markup. Take ulysses (mentioned in the article) for example. It has grown into a full-fledged writing and word processing application, but its being based on markdown originally has only hampered that. They've had to implement all of these clunky extensions and features in terms of markdown, and as the post states, try to hide the fact that it's all markdown to make it feel more like a classic word processor. At this point it just makes the whole experience clunky. People that just want to write markdown deal with weird extensions and frustrating syntax hiding, people that don't need to learn some minimal markdown just to use a word processor... It's 2024. I hope companies start to realize that markdown is a fantastic solution for certain cases but it is not the only solution. Some applications really are better served by more complex, but much more expressive markup languages, especially if they are going to shield the user from it all anyways.

jasonpbecker 2y ago
Of course you can use any number of ways to implement rich text or formatting. A lot of people want Markdown because of the portability of plain text. Markdown has served as a good mechanism for plain text formats that still can do a bit more. Ulysses would lose a significant portion of its audience if it moved to it's own syntax or some form of rich text or its own binary. A new audience would likely become interested-- though fighting Microsoft Word is ... hard to say the least. Maybe that's where Ulysses wants to go, and its own implementation of some non-standard elements suggests that. But I also know people who will not use Ulysses because of its non-standard Markdown elements resulting in files that are less portable.
sbuttgereit 2y ago
Couldn't agree more. I find that I'll choose Markdown (assuming it's a choice) when I expect multi-modal consumption... where a given text will in some contexts simply be presented as-is using plain text and the text can also take advantage of rendering into a more styled presentation. I write in-database comments (e.g. PostgreSQL's `COMMENT ON [...]`) using Markdown for this reason. My go-to database documentation tool of choice (https://schemaspy.org https://schemaspy.org) will very nicely render the Markdown into styled documentation integrated into the rest of the documentation it generates, but the plain text rendering when I'm looking at those same comments via `psql`, where no Markdown rendering is applied, still look decent due to how Markdown works.

ericyd 2y ago

> Trust me, it’s meant to be shown. Maybe it's time to accept that this thing you created is bigger than yourself and it's future is not in your hands.

gkoberger 2y ago

One thing I love about being able to see the syntax when editing is that you know what's about to happen. A backspace will always delete the previous key; you won't end up in a situation where you're deleting a whole block of content. And when you type, you know if the cursor is on the left or right side of the "*", whereas in WYSIWYG it could be on either side of the invisible change from bold to regular. It's much more relaxing for me to write in Markdown, because I don't have to think about the mode I'm in or how to get out of a small pickle. Everything is just a character. I don't think Markdown is for everything. Microsoft Word is not a Markdown editor, and most people are better served by a WYSIWYG editor. But for writing content, I always prefer personally to write in markdown (and to see the syntax), since it's easier to focus more on writing and less on the editor.

ximm 2y ago
You haven't dealt with bidirectional text yet, have you?
- gkoberger 2y ago
  I feel like that's a hard problem no matter what, and doesn't negate my personal preference for using markdown when writing longform content?
svachalek 2y ago
The thing where backspace magically reformats half your document is so frustrating. I wonder if Word's solved it as it's been decades since I've used that, but it seems like pretty much anything else I use still has that issue.
yencabulator 2y ago
This is giving me strong WordPerfect 5.1 Reveal Codes vibes.

bitwize 2y ago

Maybe it's time we brought back the "Reveal Codes" command?

slightwinder 2y ago

But syntax is ugly, especially the more complex parts we have now. And I think some of them, like tables, code blocks or modern link-style, weren't even part of the original markdown. And the reason I prefer Markdown, is because it's not proprietary, and Obsidian, my preferred Markdown-Tool, has a different workflow than the usual WYSIWYG-Tools. If Obsidian would use json or yaml for everything, I would still use it. It's just a tool for me, not the goal.

thomascgalvin 2y ago

I generally don't even like syntax highlighting for Markdown. I find having the text jump around because it became bold or italicized distracting, and it's even worse when a header is suddenly a larger size and everything below it is pushed down the screen. Markdown is simple, and I like working with it simply. I suppose there is some value in having the more complicated aspects, like images and tables, checked for syntax so you can see if you've made a mistake, but I run a macro to generate those anyway, so I'm fairly confident in the result.

diwank 2y ago
Yep but to me this feels like a lot of poor ux decisions too. I would def appreciate the visual indicators of italics and bold text but ffsake please dont toggle it every time I add a bloody keystroke. It's so jarring when editors do that. There are so many alternative designs where you can have both. For instance, on my vim the highlights only get added/removed when I switch back to normal mode, during editing nothing changes except for the actual keystrokes.

bfung 2y ago

> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown… Says the inventor of it, 20yrs ago. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

hungie 2y ago
Inventing a thing and understanding a thing aren't necessarily the same. We adopt technologies and make them our own, sometimes away from the inventor's initial vision. I think if people, by and large, enjoy markdown one way (for example in this forum, where you italicize text but the control characters don't show), then maybe the inventor is wrong. Or is right about their preferences but shouldn't try to make their preferences the de facto standard.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  The best example of that is Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, predicting the collapse of Ethernet... didn't happen. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/azevs3/til_that_ethernet_inventor_robert_metcalfe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/azevs3/til_t...
  - gowld 2y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/msg00192.html https://web.archive.org/web/20061107120353/http://www.merit.... > Of course you should understand that I ate the column only because the Internet, as far as I can tell, did not suffer a gigalapse during 1996 -- a billion lost user*hours in a single outage. The Internet has indeed bogged down (hit STOP much?) and has indeed suffered large outages (the biggest being a 118 megalapse at AOL in August) He was only wrong by a factor of 9.
- natpalmer1776 2y ago
  I think the author of the blog post intended the comment as a tongue-in-cheek joke; A humble way of pointing out that they created markdown and thus have some degree of implicit authority when speaking on the subject.

timetraveller26 2y ago

It should be optional, hide by default (maybe like Obsidian where is only visible on the cursor's line) but add an option to make it always visible

red_admiral 2y ago

Trello, once made for developers by developers, has announced that some time this August they will disable the markdown editor on desktop and force you to use the WYSIWYG one. The markdown one will remain on mobile, so there's clearly no compelling reason to do this. There won't even be an opt-out anymore. (Could someone please find out which resources we all have to add to ublock to work around this?)

paradox460 2y ago

I'd prefer if we stopped using markdown all together, and moved to something like djot: https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot

gkoberger 2y ago
Maybe djot is better... I'm sure it is in a lot of ways. But one of the key features of Markdown (and, indeed, most tech such as programming langauges) is the ubiquity. It's really hard to overcome the fact that almost every platform can export/import markdown.
Aardwolf 2y ago
Ignores newlines as well, so just as annoying as markdown to me. Why are almost all of those light formatters removing your line breaks? Everytime someone mentions some markdown variant (and there are many of them!) and I look up the syntax description, it shows that newlines are being ignored. If it's trying to be plain text, at least behave like plain text, and don't remove newlines in a shopping list like this (just like hacker news also does with its comments): -eggs -milk -flour -water BBCode has it right.
- ulbu 2y ago
  I guess, because it works well with terminal text editors, emails, and other contexts where your text isn’t wrapped at a margin. which is most places.
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    I'm mean ignoring single newlines that you enter, so it's wrapping less, not more
    - ulbu 2y ago
      you mean the newlines that make your text readable in those contexts I mentioned? :)
- 2y ago

chrismorgan 2y ago

> If you want WYSIWYG, do WYSIWYG. If you want Markdown, show the Markdown. Trust me, it’s meant to be shown. One valuable thing about using Markdown as an data storage/exchange format is that it's often easier to manipulate; for example, diffs are normally going to be better, and content edits often easier. Mind you, a proper encoding of a WYSIWYG format, and corresponding tooling, will be better... but for quick-and-dirty that normally works well, Markdown is ultimately pretty good (unfortunately, in my opinion).

taeric 2y ago

Oh wow. From headline, I first thought this meant that viewing a markdown document should show me the markup. Which falls on its face with images and links, of course. No, this is about editing the document. And... I confess I'm confused on why folks would want the opposite? WYSIWYG is, of course, a thing and popular for many reasons. So, I can see having the option to operate in that way. But a huge benefit of markup languages of any kind is that I can see the markup. Fully agreed that I should be able to see it.

thinkling 2y ago
I use markdown for note-taking. I do as much reading as editing, and they're generally intertwined. I don't want to switch between "view mode" and "edit mode". I want to be able to embed links but not have the document become cluttered with long, ugly URLs. I want to use headlines and bulleted lists and have them auto-formatted. I also want to keep my notes in a 100% portable human-readable format. (No MS Word, no Bear, no Evernote, etc.) For my use, the best solution is an app that shows me the formatted (styled) output, until I navigate the insertion point into it, and then expands the text to show the formatting. Obsidian is an app that does this. I don't love other parts of it, but the editing experience works well. (What I really want is the search/browse experience of nvUltra with the editing experience and cross-platform presence of Obsidian.)
- kragen 2y ago
  this only partially addresses your complaint, but you may or may not be aware that markdown has an option to put urls in footnotes, which you can put anywhere in the file: (This is part of the background work for [Monnier’s paper with him about Elisp’s history][3] for HOPL ’20.) ... [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386324 (Evolution of Emacs Lisp, by Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber) in my .emacs.d/init.el i wrote a command https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#L230 https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e... which inserts such a footnote link, linking the previous word to the link pasted from the clipboard. it auto-increments the footnote counter, initially setting it higher than any numbered footnote it finds in the file. i have it bound to the fairly horrible key ctrl-alt-]; successive presses of the key expand the link leftwards to include more words (it ought to use the selection as the link text if there is one, and to find an existing block of footnotes to add the footnote to if there is one, but i haven't implemented those features) the upshot of this is that in the above, after typing 'history', i pressed ctrl-alt-] and kept pressing ] until the link had engulfed monnier's name emacs markdown-mode does also automatically syntax-highlight links, headers, bulleted lists, italic, bold, typewriter code, and markdown linebreaks, and it has a command (the also rather horrible keybinding ctrl-c ctrl-o) to open a link. if the link is to a local file, it opens it in emacs rather than your browser. it also uses the tab key to expand and collapse headers, and of course it always has emacs's instantaneous full-text search. but the formatting is much uglier than obsidian's

ides_dev 2y ago

This is precisely why I use Bear [0] (although Bear does hide the link URLs) and just cannot get on with Notion. The worse thing about editing in Notion (and other editors where the syntax is hidden) is trying to adjust `mono-space text`. It always seems to get confused about whether I'm inside the mono-space area or outside it and I end up making stuff mono-space that shouldn't be or vice versa. [0] https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/

walthamstow 2y ago
For me it's Zettlr on MacOS You can also set Slack to not render the markdown until the message is sent, which I would thoroughly recommend

iambateman 2y ago

Ahh, yes. I, as a developer, think Markdown is wonderful – simple even – so I use it all the time. It finds it's way into my applications and interfaces. The pure elegance is the stuff of dreams. Then I bring a client into their app for an onboarding meeting. When they see a bit of Markdown, they start to fidget, then sweat. "Will I be asked to perform these magic incantations?" they wonder. They feel a bit of queasiness but try to hold it back. Perhaps this will be ok. But, after about 10 minutes, I show them that `# Header` is how you make a header. Their disdain is now total...How dare I imply that a hashtag implies a header. This is hard. Then, I show them a link. "It's just like this", I say: `(https://example.com)[example https://example.com)[example link]`. "You'll get used to it." Finally, the client pounds his fists on the table. "That's CODING DAMMIT. WE PAID YOU TO DO THE CODING YOU *$$HOLE. I want it to be like...well...Microsoft Word." --- You see, my friends...the real problem here is that Microsoft Word is a nightmare but it is _the_ nightmare to which all other dreams are compared. And thus, sheepishly, I awaken, and install TinyMCE.

haroldp 2y ago
And now you have a new job: untangling garbage <a>HTML      </a> disasters and coaching your clients about keeping the text styles in alignment with the site branding. :)
- iambateman 2y ago
 “Coaching clients to keep text styles aligned with the brand” should come with a trigger warning! :D
 - haroldp 2y ago
 It never does. It just LEAPS out at you on a Tuesday morning, stabbing at your eyes with pink, serif, all-caps. How about, "Coaching clients to ask for new DB fields instead of overloading existing ones?"
kragen 2y ago

teo_zero 2y ago

When I edit a C program, comments are highlighted in a specific way, but the // characters are not removed. Why should editing a markdown text be different?

fenomas 2y ago

Related: given that markdown is meant to be read, it kind of drives me up the wall that some people nowadays run autoformatters like Prettier on it. Super-aggressive formatters like prettier remove various whitespace, and mangle other things that human authors do for readability. Which is fine if the file is something that's only ever meant to be parsed by scripts, but the whole point of markdown is that people read it! (edited to add: It wouldn't really be an issue if prettier had some config options for not mangling whitespace, but that ship seems to have sailed for some reason.)

diwank 2y ago
Yes! I sometimes prefer to use `====` h1s and `----` h2s especially when I am writing slides or taking notes on a live call for others and I hate that prettier and other linters would automatically turn them into `# ` and `## ` ... Please stop doing that, prettier.
The_Colonel 2y ago
Well, Markdown is a superset of HTML where extra whitespace is usually collapsed, so this behavior isn't surprising. Having "source" Markdown looking meaningfully different from the rendered Markdown seems like an anti-pattern.
- Shog9 2y ago
 As the essay and this discussion repeatedly try to emphasize, thinking of Markdown as a "superset of HTML" is missing the point - it is meant to be read. It has both meaningful and collapsible whitespace, and both allows and encourages uses of whitespace that only have a significant effect on source readability. ...Arguably, the reason HTML has collapsible whitespace is to allow writing readable source, and once upon a time it was more common to see HTML produced in a way that didn't get in the way of this (e.g. paragraphs and indentation indicated primarily via whitespace with only opening `` and `<li>` tags). But that ship sailed; tooling long ago coalesced around more rigid conventions, and thus the need for Markdown emerged. Throwing those advantages away raises the question of why bother using Markdown at all.

kragen 2y ago

maybe as a compromise the markdown metacharacters should be displayed in a lighter-weight font, a smaller font, or a reduced-contrast color? then you can see them, so it isn't a mystery how to type them, but the visual noise they add to the text you're editing is minimal

eslaught 2y ago

I guess I'll defend the minority opinion. For context, I write over 100k words a year. That's something like 150 pages depending on how you format it. This includes both technical documents (which I mainly do in Latex) and more traditional long-form writing (which I do in Markdown). For technical documents, formatting is very much a key part of the presentation, so I want to see the markup. I mainly use Emacs and I render the PDF from the terminal when I want to see it. Fidelity to the final result is essential, so I don't bother with Latex IDEs (unless I'm doing collaborative editing on Overleaf). For my long-form writing, I want the markup to get out of the way. I use Markdown because it's simple and portable and generates a large number of formats (via Pandoc); that does NOT mean that I want the asterisks and hash signs and so on staring me in the face. Also, frankly, it's just easier to write when the text looks pretty. For most of this writing I write in Typora (with a nice variable-width font), and then edit in Emacs with the generated PDF side-by-side. Why bother with Markdown at all? Because Word ultimately gets in the way of me producing nice documents. The fact that I can move my cursor to see exactly what the markup is, and that this markup is simple and straightforward and maps well into what I'm trying to generate, helps me focus on content and avoid distractions. Word has far too many knobs, far too many ways to do something that looks visually correct but generates the wrong markup (especially when you're going to do post-processing in some other tool), and really hinders refactoring (when you need to make global style changes). So I use Markdown, but again, that doesn't mean I want markup staring me in the face. I'm not sure why people are so incredulous that this is a desirable goal? I mean it should be pretty obvious that the apps would not exist if there wasn't a market for it, so clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way.

verdverm 2y ago

There are some editors, like TipTap, that output a json object, even though they look like they could be markdown editors. This is my goto React Markdown editor, very solid out of the box and customizable in all sorts of ways https://uiwjs.github.io/react-md-editor/ https://uiwjs.github.io/react-md-editor/

Doctor_Fegg 2y ago

> I have no idea why there are now apps that use Markdown as their back end storage format but only show styled text without the Markdown source code visible. Because backend storage of rich text is not a solved problem? RTF is a horrid, over-complex serialisation. Some platforms have their own internal format for rich text (e.g. NSAttributedString) but serialisation is either lacking or platform-specific. Writing as WYSIWYG but storing in the backend as Markdown is not an insane idea, and I say that as someone whose muscle memory has been cmd-B/cmd-I since 1992 and would never choose to actually compose in Markdown unless I had to.

throwmeawaysire 2y ago

People say that Markdown is isomorphic to HTML but HTML has , , , and , while Markdown bold and italic almost always get transformed into and , right? According to MDN the HTML standard defines clearly very different semantics for the elements, although IIRC there was once a drive to move away from and as presentational, which is why people started using and instead but in a way as if they were presentational, kinda defeating the point. IDK, what do you think? ": The Bring Attention To element" ": The Idiomatic Text element" ": The Emphasis element" ": The Strong Importance element"

bastawhiz 2y ago

If you only care to expose limited formatting to the user, whether the file is stored in Markdown or not is immaterial. It could be stored in Word 2003 DOC format and export to Markdown, and if the serialization and deserialization are faithful, it doesn't matter at all. Markdown is portable, fast, safe, and simple. Being able to dump your data as Markdown (which you know works, because the Markdown version is the literal source of truth) means you're guaranteed to be able to extract your data and move it wherever you want with perfect fidelity. That's a huge bonus. The argument here is pointless if your concern isn't the syntax: Markdown _as a serialization format_ versus Markdown _as a typeable syntax_ are two separate concerns. The UX of a tool meant for editing Markdown is going to be extremely different than a tool to edit simple rich text. In my own app, I default to WYSIWYG with an option to edit the raw markdown (for podcast show notes, which have very limited formatting options). Why? Because the alternative is HTML and that sucks to write by hand (especially if you can't use most tags).

dogsledsleddog 2y ago

I think the don't do it if you are mixing, purist thinking cycles through for each UI and is generally pointless and doesn't serve people who take it up. All the rat poison oriented window managers also have a great point and the ones with no mouse support at all might be perfect for many but it is silly and counter productive not to provide the mouse support because it is an anti pattern and pretend that all the users who need to see the benefits of avoiding the anti pattern, and practice [not] using it, are going to somehow magically end up trying the purist UIs.

j1elo 2y ago

Before I learned the existence of Markdown, the intuitive most logical markup for me was (and after 10+ years of writing Markdown, still is): * *Asterisks* should be bold. Like WhatsApp and Slack do. Because they bring attention to the eye, marking a strong emphasis, and also because for italics there seem to be a much better alternative. * /Slash/ should be italics. Young me thought this was so obvious! Because italic text is leaning to the right, just like the slash bar. (Note that with time I ended up realizing that this would be a bad idea because slashes are too commonly used in plain written language. The parser would need to be too clever. But still, seemed nice for a while :-) * _Underscore_ should be underline. I mean, the name says it all. This is so obvious to me that I never understood how it's not the case. I had been writing _this_ to visualize an underlined word for so much time before learning Markdown, that having it for italics just feels strange. Anyway. If someone knows some resource about the thought process, discussions, or decisions that were made to adopt the current syntax (especially to decide that _underscore_ should italicize, which feels so strange) please let me know, I love reading about that kind of thing :)

tasuki 2y ago
In polite society, underlined text is not a thing. I'm with you wrt slash for italics, but sometimes you also just want to write a slash... how would you do that? Underscores are good because you never really want to display them...
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  If you're documenting technical things (what markdown is most commonly used for) underscores need to be displayed all the time because they are common in all sorts of resource and variable names.
  - j1elo 2y ago
    Just adding that for technical terms that include underscores, I am on the camp that most if not all of the times they should also be marked as such (as a technical identifier of something) with `backquotes`. Which solves the issue of having unexpected formatting. I agree, however, than my original naive idea of using slashes was not so good. Obviously some practice gives a better understanding of the problem, and nowadays I see it differently. The slash is too common in written language; it's actually a good thing that unintended italics are not introduced after writing some trivial slashed term in a text, such as "he/him".

preommr 2y ago

90% sure the reason is that new users, not familiar with the app, want to see that the change is actually taking place. Without it, the user may expect the post would literally be '*text*' instead of being bolded.

rubymamis 2y ago

> I have no idea why there are now apps that use Markdown as their back end storage format but only show styled text without the Markdown source code visible. The reason why we do in Plume[1] is simple - we want a WYSIWYG editor for our non-technical users, yet also the reassuring longevity of a plain text format such as Markdown. Simple as that. In my opinion, it's a combo that's hard to beat. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/

Vaslo 2y ago

I’ve run into this exact same issue with many of the self hosted wikis/tools. Some of the ones I had interest in like Trilium don’t have native support and you have to use a plug-in hack to see both the code and the preview, or you have to click back and forth between rendering and redoing. I just wouldn’t have markdown in my software if I wasn’t going to support a preview.

voltaireodactyl 2y ago

There’s a screenwriting markdown variant called fountain that has underlining and basically works perfectly for nearly any writing. Wish it were more widespread.