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For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores fo
by xigoi 7mo ago
For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages.
• I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic.
• I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists.
• I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
- chrisweekly 7mo agoI suggest trying Obsidian for WYSIWYG markdown editing. It beats heck out of typing it raw and eliminates that cognitive load.
- xigoi 7mo agoI don’t like WYSIWYG editing, as it makes the formatting invisible.
- delecti 7mo agoThen you might like Obsidian. When the cursor is in some bit of formatted text, it displays all of the characters. When the cursor is elsewhere, it just shows the formatted text. In the worst case, the barrier to entry and exit are pretty low.
- lolive 7mo agoObsidian has 2 main advantages to me. First you can switch from WYSIWYG to text editor instantly. Then you have an outline where you can manipulate your “markdown blocks” [i.e title and its content] by drag n drop. Or extract a “markdown block” as a new note, and leave a reference where it originally was extracted from. And then [the killing feature], it displays the content of a link, web link or internal link, as a [kind of] iframe, if you prepend a ! to the link.
- nxpnsv 7mo ago1&2 just pick one, it doesn’t matter. 3 mostly you’re the parser… if you’re after accuracy there are better versions, but it sure is simple to read and write
- mh- 7mo ago> compared to other markup languages I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days. What are you contrasting to? As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.
- xigoi 7mo ago> I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. HTML? Also my markup language I created for myself, which is currently not published.
- mkldd 7mo ago[flagged]
- nickloewen 7mo agoI used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails. In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..." Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."
- mschnell 7mo agoI remember it like this: If you squint the brackets around the link text make a rectangle and look almost like a button you can press. [Press here](to.go.there)
- klez 7mo ago> the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and () I remember it as passing parameters to a function that requires an URL as an argument. Maybe it's not the most straightforward way, but it works for me
- GandalfHN 7mo ago[flagged]
- GandalfHN 7mo ago[flagged]
- arunbose 7mo ago[dead]