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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

What do you consider “better” here: having to use the mouse to click on menus to make something italic? Or do I misunderstand.

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Rich text editing doesn’t demand a mouse: it’s the same number of keystrokes to press cmd-b as it is to do shift-8. But if the intended output is rich text, then wysiwyg is a better interface for editing, yes. Not everything needs to degrade to a teletype.

But it’s more than just hitting cmd-b, isn’t it? Doesn’t the text that you want to be bold need to be selected first?

Not usually, no. But applying formatting on top of selection is another rich text benefit: with text selected cmd-B makes it bold, shift-8 just replaces the selection with an asterisk (in a standard text field)

cmd-B does nothing in a standard text field. If you mean text fields with code to handle keyboard shortcuts, you can just as easily have cmd-B surround text in asterisks as trigger wysiwyg bold formatting.

I am comparing basic rich text editing (eg the Mac of the 1980s) with the plain text areas and email composers that Markdown was designed for.

In rich text interfaces, keyboard shortcuts do more and work better than they do when typing Markdown in pure plain text environments.

That you can build better keyboard shortcuts for plain text areas is of course true, but it’s still a hack on top of a hack.

Markdown is plaintext, because of e-mail, which works best as plaintext. A plaintext format is much easier to write consistently, without issues like invisible formatting [0] (which will bite you when editing), or Microsoft Word’s decision to make your ordered-list markers bold because some part of the previous line or this line is bold (and I’m almost convinced the algorithm for that is closely linked to rand()).

[0]: https://xkcd.com/2109/

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