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I might be the only one, but I actually prefer Markdowns handling of a single "enter" without spaces at the end to mean that the paragraph is not finished. It m

I might be the only one, but I actually prefer Markdowns handling of a single "enter" without spaces at the end to mean that the paragraph is not finished. It makes writing blogs and various other stuff in Vim much simpler, and I can more easily reformat text to wrap at 80 characters, and have better control over it. Could I soft-wrap in my editor? Sure, but that would mean that the text files sitting on my hard drive now have very long strings in them making it harder to grep, making it harder to add to git (change a single character, entire line is now a diff :-(). I hope that doesn't become the default.

jomar 14y ago
I guess there is a distinction between * people typing markdown in text files, where you want to split paragraphs into word-wrapped lines of a sensible length, and consecutive non-blank lines form paragraphs just as they always have in text files; * and people typing markdown into text entry boxes on web pages, where you would like pressing the <enter> key to actually mean something. These two situations probably prefer a different default.
- X-Istence 14y ago
  Then make the form that the user enters data into be either parsed differently, by pre-processing it, or have some javascript magic that automatically adds the extra two spaces required to make it work. This way if the user presses <Enter><Enter> then the JS can remove the extra two spaces and it will still be valid markdown.
pjscott 14y ago
Believe me, you're not the only one who prefers this behavior. It makes working with hard-wrapped text a hell of a lot easier.
RegEx 14y ago
I agree completely. Visually highlighting a paragraph that went a bit too wide and cleaning it up with 'gq' makes me a happy camper.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Do you know about gqip ?
  - RegEx 14y ago
    No, I didn't, but thanks! That's very useful. Additionally, google + the help command led me to :help text-objects, which describes a lot more goodies similar to 'ip'.
halostatue 14y ago
If this is a change that Jeff really wants, he needs to fork Markdown. This change actively subverts one of the goals that Gruber set down for Markdown, which is that Normal People can use it. Changing this, especially for people who implement Markdown parsers, is geek arrogance.
- alanh 14y ago
  You’re flat-out wrong. The biggest deployments of Markdown — StackOverflow & GitHub — do not squash line breaks. They made this decision because authors did not assume their line breaks would be discarded. The change is not geek arrogance. It is, in fact, a reaction to how Normal People use it.
  - halostatue 14y ago
    If you think that users of StackOverflow and GitHub are “Normal People”, you need to adjust your personal RDF. My wife is not a geek or a programmer. She will, if forced, learn the intricacies of an idiotic programmer‘s decision to make something easier for him (and it’s almost invariably a him) in order to participate in a particular forum. This is why people put up with crap like bbcode every single day. That doesn’t mean she enjoys it. Markdown works because it makes plain text readable and formatted nicely. Markdown works because it works just as well in a plain text email as it does in an HTML-formatted email. It doesn’t work because some geek says that the people who use heavily geek-oriented sites (StackOverflow & GitHub, to use your examples) are in fact ”Normal People”. (And, just for what it’s worth, I do find the fact that I have to join all my hard-wrapped lines back together in SO & GH comments to be immensely annoying. At least their markdown parser for .markdown files doesn’t do this.) So, no I am not flat-out wrong. I hear geek whining that parsing is made harder because of a design feature that is present because most people don't think about or want to think about “correct” line-endings. Before you decide that I’m full of hot air, understand that I am working with my wife’s novel that’s written in Markdown so that I can parse it (possibly using an existing well-written-and-maintained parser like peg-markdown or peg-multimarkdown as an intermediate mechanism) and then transform it into the LaTeX formatting required for making her PDF output and the HTML formatting required for making her EPUB (and thus MOBI) output. I am well aware of how ugly some of it is…but it makes it easier for her to write her novel without falling back to proprietary formats like .docx. I’m willing to deal with some pain as an implementor in order to minimize what she has to deal with. As such, I don’t really have a lot of patience for this type of geek whinging.
eob 14y ago
Lots of people are with you. I think this behavior is the better route because it accommodates both crowds. The line-wrap folks can just press enter twice; no biggie. But the console and vim users of the world can continue using line-breaks the way that work best for their environment. On the flip side, making a single enter start a new paragraph wouldn't really help the GUI users (what's the difference between one line break and two, really?) but it would really hurt the console users of the world
fiddlosopher 14y ago
I, too, would be strongly against "automatic return-based linebreaks." Given that markdown has constructions for lists and code blocks, one very rarely needs a hard line break anyway. Currently markdown works fine both for people who hard-wrap and people who soft-wrap. Let's keep it that way.

jomar 14y ago

I guess there is a distinction between * people typing markdown in text files, where you want to split paragraphs into word-wrapped lines of a sensible length, and consecutive non-blank lines form paragraphs just as they always have in text files; * and people typing markdown into text entry boxes on web pages, where you would like pressing the <enter> key to actually mean something. These two situations probably prefer a different default.

X-Istence 14y ago
Then make the form that the user enters data into be either parsed differently, by pre-processing it, or have some javascript magic that automatically adds the extra two spaces required to make it work. This way if the user presses <Enter><Enter> then the JS can remove the extra two spaces and it will still be valid markdown.

pjscott 14y ago

Believe me, you're not the only one who prefers this behavior. It makes working with hard-wrapped text a hell of a lot easier.

RegEx 14y ago

I agree completely. Visually highlighting a paragraph that went a bit too wide and cleaning it up with 'gq' makes me a happy camper.

Evbn 14y ago
Do you know about gqip ?
- RegEx 14y ago
  No, I didn't, but thanks! That's very useful. Additionally, google + the help command led me to :help text-objects, which describes a lot more goodies similar to 'ip'.

halostatue 14y ago

If this is a change that Jeff really wants, he needs to fork Markdown. This change actively subverts one of the goals that Gruber set down for Markdown, which is that Normal People can use it. Changing this, especially for people who implement Markdown parsers, is geek arrogance.

alanh 14y ago
You’re flat-out wrong. The biggest deployments of Markdown — StackOverflow & GitHub — do not squash line breaks. They made this decision because authors did not assume their line breaks would be discarded. The change is not geek arrogance. It is, in fact, a reaction to how Normal People use it.
- halostatue 14y ago
  If you think that users of StackOverflow and GitHub are “Normal People”, you need to adjust your personal RDF. My wife is not a geek or a programmer. She will, if forced, learn the intricacies of an idiotic programmer‘s decision to make something easier for him (and it’s almost invariably a him) in order to participate in a particular forum. This is why people put up with crap like bbcode every single day. That doesn’t mean she enjoys it. Markdown works because it makes plain text readable and formatted nicely. Markdown works because it works just as well in a plain text email as it does in an HTML-formatted email. It doesn’t work because some geek says that the people who use heavily geek-oriented sites (StackOverflow & GitHub, to use your examples) are in fact ”Normal People”. (And, just for what it’s worth, I do find the fact that I have to join all my hard-wrapped lines back together in SO & GH comments to be immensely annoying. At least their markdown parser for .markdown files doesn’t do this.) So, no I am not flat-out wrong. I hear geek whining that parsing is made harder because of a design feature that is present because most people don't think about or want to think about “correct” line-endings. Before you decide that I’m full of hot air, understand that I am working with my wife’s novel that’s written in Markdown so that I can parse it (possibly using an existing well-written-and-maintained parser like peg-markdown or peg-multimarkdown as an intermediate mechanism) and then transform it into the LaTeX formatting required for making her PDF output and the HTML formatting required for making her EPUB (and thus MOBI) output. I am well aware of how ugly some of it is…but it makes it easier for her to write her novel without falling back to proprietary formats like .docx. I’m willing to deal with some pain as an implementor in order to minimize what she has to deal with. As such, I don’t really have a lot of patience for this type of geek whinging.

eob 14y ago

Lots of people are with you. I think this behavior is the better route because it accommodates both crowds. The line-wrap folks can just press enter twice; no biggie. But the console and vim users of the world can continue using line-breaks the way that work best for their environment. On the flip side, making a single enter start a new paragraph wouldn't really help the GUI users (what's the difference between one line break and two, really?) but it would really hurt the console users of the world

fiddlosopher 14y ago

I, too, would be strongly against "automatic return-based linebreaks." Given that markdown has constructions for lists and code blocks, one very rarely needs a hard line break anyway. Currently markdown works fine both for people who hard-wrap and people who soft-wrap. Let's keep it that way.