Markdown is meant to be shown (2021)

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/03/05/snell-ios-markdown-editors

by SoKamil • 2 years ago

204 165 2 years 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-bar5• 2 years 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.

bachmeier2• 2 years 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-bar5• 2 years ago

I’ve been scouring the preferences pane once again but can’t find anything like it. Any tips?

replete• 2 years 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-snippe...

tjoff• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

gsinclair• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

msf1024• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

But uh, how do you undo the styling from the keyboard? Does Backspace turn "italic" into "*italic"?

wccrawford• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

g15jv2dp2• 2 years ago

Ctrl+Z

diwank3• 2 years ago

It does on a lot of editors and I hate it. 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.

Slackwise• 2 years ago

because it is fast and keyboard-driven

How is it faster to press `*` than `Ctrl-I` in any other rich text editor?

The idea that it is meant to be seen is no more than a personal preference.

Actually, the entire philosophy of Markdown is that, even if you didn't process it into HTML or some form of rich text, it uses common conventions that have been used across Usenet, IRC, and plaintext files for years, and is thus readable without ever being processed. In fact, you can likely take various plaintext files and process them and they'll gain many incidental markups and highlights.

Meaning, Markdown is Markdown without needing to be turned into HTML or rich text. It is, in itself, a great way to universally markup text as people have been doing online for years.

watwut2• 2 years ago

You need to highlight first and only then to press ctrl-I. So yes, typing is faster if you do it a lot.

kragen7• 2 years ago

i haven't pushed it to github yet, but i have a keybinding for alt-* similar to the alt-` binding at https://github.com/kragen/kragen-.emacs.d/blob/master/init.e... which italicizes the previous word. that way, to italicize a single word, which is the most common case, i only have to press alt-* once. successive presses expand the italicized region leftwards over more words (this happens whenever the cursor is directly to the right of a *; it isn't activated by an invisible bit that remembers whether the previous command was also an alt-*)

(it also ought to italicize the selection when there's an active selection, but i haven't implemented that yet)

i think this is a superior interaction paradigm to the paradigm where ctrl-i sets an italics mode that doesn't visibly change anything near the cursor, but affects the future text you type. that design not only usually requires more keystrokes but causes mode errors. this is how ctrl-i and ctrl-b should always have worked, and if larry tesler had thought of the idea by 01983, that's how they always would have worked

however, the keystroke ctrl-i is easier to type than the keystroke alt-*

themadturk• 2 years ago

How is it faster to press `*` than `Ctrl-I` in any other rich text editor?

The shift key is right under my pinkie, a bit easier than the CMD key on my Mac (much less the Ctrl) for me.

phone8675309• 2 years 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• 2 years 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!

keybored2• 2 years ago

The deadpan

Based on his interaction with the CommonMark people I would characterize it more as overly possessive.

tomcam• 2 years ago

Milspec troll. I was nonplussed and rechecked a few of his articles as well.

zeveb• 2 years 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.

jareklupinski2• 2 years 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

KeplerBoy• 2 years 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.

jareklupinski2• 2 years 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)

red_admiral2• 2 years ago

Someone please tell Atlassian who are about to disable this for trello desktop.

voidhorse• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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) 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.

j1elo5• 2 years ago

Ulysses? Take an app with a MUCH wider audience: WhatsApp!

They use Markdown-esque syntax for message formatting. It mostly is Markdown, with a single caveat that gets me a lot: *Single asterisks* become bold, instead of italic. For italics, you have to use _underscores_.

Other syntax works fine. Slack also uses Markdown. In summary that's nice as it is just one single syntax to remember across systems. I wouldn't enjoy too much that every app started having its own different, more expressive syntax, at least not for apps which their primary job is communication, not text edition.

voidUpdate• 2 years ago

It really annoys me that services can't decide if * is bold or italics. It makes the most sense to me as italics, so when I use whatsapp or youtube I always get annoyed that it did the wrong one

chrismorgan2• 2 years ago

Slack also uses Markdown.

No it doesn't. It uses something they call mrkdwn, which is only vaguely superficially similar to Markdown. In most important places, mrkdwn has made different decisions from Markdown. It's a completely different, and far more rudimentary, Lightweight Markup Language.

slightwinder2• 2 years ago

Markdown is build on popular custom syntax from mails and other message-platforms. WhatsApp is probably doing the same. Similar problem exist with all the other simple markup-languages, doing the same. At the end, there is only limited syntax available for those cases, those they are destined to have similarities and duplicates.

playingalong• 2 years ago

Wait. In my Slack asterisks mean bold too.

ericyd• 2 years 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.

gkoberger3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

You haven't dealt with bidirectional text yet, have you?

gkoberger3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

This is giving me strong WordPerfect 5.1 Reveal Codes vibes.

bitwize• 2 years ago

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

slightwinder2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

diwank3• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown…

Says the inventor of it, 20yrs ago. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

hungie2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_t...

natpalmer1776• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_admiral2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

gkoberger3• 2 years 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.

Aardwolf2• 2 years 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.

ulbu2• 2 years 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.

BeFlatXIII• 2 years ago

They're designed for a world where soft-wrapping source text isn't the norm.

codemac• 2 years ago

Markdown has lots of syntax from irc/email that folks have been using for decades. The popularity is also due this, it was partially a refinement rather than invented.

This is also why the parsing ambiguity/backtracking ends up occurring - humans can read plaintext and do pattern matching with context/attention whereas parsing algorithms have a hard time.

chrismorgan2• 2 years 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).

taeric2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.)

kragen7• 2 years 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.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

taeric2• 2 years ago

This sounds like an agreement, then? I get why WYSIWG is pleasing sometimes. Most of the time it is not what I would want during editing, though.

ides_dev• 2 years 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/

walthamstow• 2 years 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

iambateman3• 2 years 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 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.

haroldp2• 2 years 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. :)

iambateman3• 2 years ago

“Coaching clients to keep text styles aligned with the brand” should come with a trigger warning! :D

kragen7• 2 years ago

this sounds like fiction you wrote about stereotypes rather than honest reporting of your experiences—and not only because you got the markdown link syntax backwards

iambateman3• 2 years ago

I enjoyed the dramatic value, for sure.

But I did have a client who really hated markdown because she couldn’t make colors red.

teo_zero• 2 years 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?

fenomas4• 2 years 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.)

diwank3• 2 years 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_Colonel5• 2 years 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.

Shog92• 2 years 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.

jpc0• 2 years ago

You are confused about markdown.

There is no "source markdown". Markdown is meant to be formatted to be read, without any intermediate step. "Prettifiers" like github etc are just converting the markdown into "styled" text. The format was always meant to be read as is.

SllX3• 2 years ago

Markdown is an intermediate format between a writer and rendered HTML. It is easier to read, write and edit as a writer (or someone reviewing someone else’s writing intended for the web) before generating and serving HTML. It’s not a superset, it’s not a subset, and it’s not HTML, although you can include HTML tags within a Markdown document to include things Markdown does not provide coverage for.

Which is to say there isn’t any such thing as “source Markdown” and “rendered Markdown”. Markdown is the source, HTML is the output, although you can make your own parser output to whatever you want.

bastawhiz2• 2 years ago

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!

Nobody is running prettier on their code or markup for the benefit of the computer. If it's not readable, it's just a bad formatting tool (or wasn't configured properly). The whole point of a formatter is to make it easier to read.

Shog92• 2 years ago

Pretty much the only benefit I've seen of running prettier on Markdown is to highlight mistakes in formatting that otherwise wouldn't be apparent without viewing rendered output (which it highlights mostly by trashing the file in some fairly obvious way).

The stated philosophy behind Prettier is to end arguments within a team about how to format code, which... Given Markdown is already heavily constrained, barely applies; unlike other languages supported by Prettier, there are precious few adjustments made to Markdown that are clearly intentionally made in pursuit of consistent readability - indeed, if I recall correctly the Prettier Markdown engine is mostly just a round-trip through the remark.js parser and stringifier, and the results reflect this - the results look mechanical, and it is just as likely to eliminate whitespace that lends clarity as it is to add it (if not, as the GP suggests, more likely).

Sadly, there are remark.js plugins that could have been used to e.g. enforce consistent use of whitespace without stripping everything down to the bare minimum, but last I looked the Prettier folk were pretty hostile toward any suggestions that their (default, bare-minimum-effort) "style" was at all problematic.

fenomas4• 2 years ago

Prettier disagrees, as I understand it. Its authors know it's "wrong" to take this:

    const matrix = [
        1, 0, 0, 
        0, 1, 0, 
        0, 0, 1,
    ]

and collapse it onto one line. But their view is that reformatting everything from scratch is more important that such things, and that it's reasonable to add /* ignore */ comments to every single place where you want anything preserved.

danbee• 2 years ago

I'm not a fan of Prettier at all. A log of the time I find it makes code uglier.

kragen7• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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/

Doctor_Fegg• 2 years 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• 2 years 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"

bastawhiz2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

j1elo5• 2 years 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• 2 years 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...

indoordin0saur2• 2 years 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.

desas• 2 years ago

Use / for a slash and use // for //italics// and make *bold* match.

BalinKing• 2 years ago

This is precisely how Org mode works in Emacs, IIRC. Now I'm curious who was the first person to invent this syntax—like you say, it seems like a very natural choice, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't have a long history of some sort.

spc476• 2 years ago

Back when most writers used typewriters, the convention was to use the underscore to mark text that was to be italicized. And because they were using typewriters, they would backspace to the first letter of a word or phrase, then type the underscore under each characters to be italicized. When computers came along, backspace worked differently (back up, replace character with space), so the convention was to start and end the word/phrase with an underscore, _like this_.

Using asterisks for bold is again an adaptation for computers. With typewriters, you could just back up and retype the word/phrase to get a bolder look (maybe a few times to really make it stand out).

j1elo5• 2 years ago

Thanks! that was very insightful. In the end, most things end up having an historical reason behind their rationale...

samstave• 2 years ago

This is how it was in yee olden times... I've asked a couple time that HN takeone the content boxes of reddit's markdown. What I do with markdown (copying formatting of tables and such super well, is to paste it into the 'Visual Tab' in Rstudio, and then click to the CODE tab and copy the properly formatted markdown, then past that into a reddit comment and get the great formatting that I want.

For example when I have GPTs spit out tables for researching a topic.

https://i.imgur.com/4gIGYLu.png

https://i.imgur.com/DJVhrUr.png

https://i.imgur.com/aTRWN5S.png

setopt2• 2 years ago

The main problem with slash as italics is that I very often write either file Unix file paths (like /etc/) or lists of alternatives (like vim/emacs/etc), and such markup languages tend to get confused.

I rarely have that issue with * and _, since they only really appear as explicit symbols in code or math which already have other syntax markers.

nj5rq• 2 years ago

As someone else mentioned, this is how Org mode works on Emacs, not only that, but by setting:

    (setq org-hide-emphasis-markers t)

You can hide the markers (*, /, _, etc.) by default, and toggle them with:

    M-x visible-mode

It also has many other features that integrate well with Emacs.

preommr• 2 years 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• 2 years 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/

Vaslo• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

Markdown is meant to be shown (2021)

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