4 ms·

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

• 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.