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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)

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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.

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