Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

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Can somebody help me understand something about Markdown and Obsidian?

Why would I ever want an edit mode and a preview mode while taking notes? Don't I want to be able to both see my note and edit it at any time?

I mean, I guess I could just ignore preview mode if the edit mode actually allowed me to see all of the content of my note, but it doesn't. Images are only visible in preview mode. So all the talk about transclusion seems dumb to me. I can't see jack unless I decide to stop working and start viewing. I just don't get it. Is this really what people do? Switch back and forth between editing and viewing all the time?

Or perhaps they just decide to put all the content of the note on-screen twice? But why would I ever want to look at the same content twice? We're not talking about folding, so I can see two different places in the same note. We're talking viewing the exact same content twice, cutting my usable screen real estate in half for displaying the content of my note. So I have 50% of the context I could have... And don't even get me started about how synchronized scrolling is impossible in this view if you use images in your note.

I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, because everybody seems to love using markdown, and I really want to like it, too. I know the benefits of plaintext. But I just don't get making that sort of usability sacrifice.

We're working on WYSIWYG but it's not an easy problem. Eventually we want editing to feel comfortable to everyone! :)

That's good news for me, but apparently a lot of people don't feel the need for it. I'm still confused why. In general, are people switching modes or doing side-by-side or what?

Writting and browsing are often different mental modes. You are not always working with your notes, but mostly reading them. Thus have a plain edit-mode used 10% the time, and a rich viewing-mode for the remaining 90% of the usage-time is good enough for many people.

I think most people are used to seeing the source and can basically "imagine" what it looks like. So they really only switch for double checking before sending something out I would say.

Many people in our community said things about "staying in the editor" so I guess that's a common workflow.

I think I could get used to that in notes where I don't embed images.

For me, I just don’t look at the preview at all. Markdown is simple enough that I know how it will be rendered.

To be fair, I do enjoy the Typora model where my images get automatically included in the edit mode, but I don’t specifically need it.

I honestly don't think people have ever used good WYSIWYG editors.

i feel the same about the dual window (edit and preview) concept of markdown. such a hackish way and distracts the writing. rooting for a nice wysiwyg markdown editor for vscode and light weight program for windows.

I also feel like hot keys, VIM key bindings, and org-mode key bindings are a big part of what make it good to use for a power user. Bindings are learn once, benefit forever, whereas no key bindings may make it easy initially but are an infinite drag on productivity.

It depends on the editor, but esp for markdown pure text, WYSIWYG is a thorny topic - see slack's recent problems with their IME. Typora has a nice feel and switches from editor to preview as you move to the next area in a document.

Obsidian is trying this a bit with their headings, but seemingly small features like this are very difficult to get to feel natural, esp for devs comfortable with ASCII.

> I just don't get it. Is this really what people do? Switch back and forth between editing and viewing all the time?

Yes, I do this all the time. In particular I want to be editing my markdown in a fixed-width font (because it includes a lot of code, typically), but also able to view it prettily.

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