Ask HN: Why is Markdown considered “faster” than WYSIWYG | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Markdown considered “faster” than WYSIWYG

5 pointstaurusnoises9 comments

See see this sentiment a lot.

For some context: I use Obsidian for maintaining my zettelkasten, and feel fairly proficient in basic Markdown writing. I enjoy it, and I can see some of the benefits to having this as the base for a document. However, I often see people causally referring to Markdown as a faster way to type, or somehow more efficient way of writing than WYSIWYG. I'm confused by this.

The argument I see online is that writing platforms like Google Docs, etc. require you to use your mouse. As a writer and author of long works, I've used Docs for years. For the vast majority of formatting that takes place in writing (bold, italics, M-dashes, etc), these are all keyboard shortcut commands. Quick and easy to do. Headings as well. And, while you can achieve these in Markdown sometimes in the same way (ie command + B for bold), the pure markdown approach of asterisks, underscores, etc seem waaaaay more clunky. Not to mention Obsidian's weird autofill on () and "" where God forbid you want to go back and add either, you're left with deleting excess autofills and the like.

So, what am I missing. Is Markdown not really for long-form writing? Is it another case of "here's something that really great, not for every scenario, but let's pretend like it is."?I trust the sentiment of faster and more convenient is true. But, I'm just not seeing how. Can ya help me understand?

Edit: Could it be that I'm conflating Obsidian's interpretation of markdown with the markdown as a whole? Since Obsidian is my primary use case....

I'm militantly anti-WYSIWYG and pro markdown

- I don't need key commands. What you call clunky I call orders of magnitude more ergonomic.

- Keep in mind things like _italic_ __bold__ and `code` "just work" on mobile.

- Code blocks.

- The document isn't formatting for me while I am typing on it.

- I don't need to type it in your shitty/slow/buggy web editor, I can copy/paste it from my text editor with zero formatting errors.

- I don't care about tables.

- I don't care about type faces or font height.

- I don't care about margins or page breaks, it will never be printed.

- I want to write in monospaced text 100% of the time.

- Hyper links and image links are trivial to add.

- A table of contents is trivial to add.

Confluence for example is the exact opposite of the doc writing experience I want.

Markdown is essentially the perfect balance between quick writing and good enough reading, with no mouse interactions and a standard enough interface for all the places I want to use it (internal docs, GitHub issues, online notes, code review, etc).

Hard yes for markdown!

I would say an important factor is free choice of editor. I can work much quicker with vim than any other editor, others might have different preferences.

When I work with WYSIWYG editors like Word, I often find myself struggling with unwanted text selection behavior of the editor, formatting issues, program slowdowns due to high CPU usage and the like.

It's faster for me but not for everyone. It depends on what you need.

For complex documents, I resort to LaTeX whenever I can (collaboration often makes Word/Writer mandatory). It's still faster for me than using WYSIWYG unless I'm trying to create something with few text but with heavy formatting. Then, I might prefer Scribus or Illustrator, though.

Thanks for your response.

Markdown is quick for small documents with simple formatting because the formatting is just another keystroke or two. On the other hand, the app I run is in a niche of large legal documents with heavy formatting, and my userbase despises markdown. So it isn't correct for everyone.

Like any other tool, there are places to use it effectively, and places where it is the wrong solution.

Why does this matter? Offer both markdown and WYSIWYG and let each user use what they find preferable. If you prefer WYSIWYG, keep using it.

As an example I used to mostly write the markup where it's accepted even when there are formatting buttons right above the text input area and lately I use an arbitrary mix. There are some editing operations that work very well though, like in Slack where you can select text and Cmd+V a URL that's in your clipboard to make a link--that's easier than the markup or using formatting buttons.

Try Typora; that's the most established markdown WYSIWYG editor.

markdown has a learning curve, average user has no idea how to use it and they need to invest some time to learn it.

If you never tried before, WYSIWYG is more easy to understand for first timers.

But if you spent some time with markdown, it will be the more effective one to use.

Why is it more effective though? In what ways? Regarding speed and efficiency, is it really any faster after the learning curve? I'm pretty quick at it, and I still find it clunky. But, perhaps what's clunky to me is Obsidian's interpretation of markdown and not markdown itself.

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