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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.

> Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.

You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.

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There are also the multitude of people that use markdown in chat applications, which usually implement a form of WYSIWYG editing, e.g., Slack.

Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after -<Space>.

There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.

Because it’s still not Markdown, not by a long shot. https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics may call it “mrkdwn”, but it bears only a very superficial resemblance to Markdown—in significant chunks it’s closer to one or two other lightweight markup languages than to Markdown.

Have you tried recently? There was a period when I also had WYSIWYG enabled solely because markdown links weren't working for me, but that's been fixed (at least for me) for a while now.

Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.

A few years ago, Slack was "plain text entry box for markdown"

In ~2019, it changed to "WYSIWYG with markdown converted to WYSIWYG as you type". If you type "Hello *world*" the * will disappear and the "world" will be bolded - and you can also get bold with Ctrl+B or pressing a 'bold' button or pasting bold rich text.

There's an option to disable it [1], so if your slack experience is different you might have WYSIWYG disabled.

And if you think markdown usually means *foo* producing italics, and **foo** for bold, all I can say is yes.

[1] https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1201955273667158023?lang=...

Yes I disabled the WYSIWYG editor the day it landed.

The exact syntax of bold/italics is just a flavor... "markdown" as a design pattern vs. "Markdown" as a specific implementation or specification.

I don't know all of your mentioned apps that well, but the ones I know just hide the markdown and provide shortcuts and buttons to insert it. I for one almost never use the shortcuts or syntax insertion buttons in Bear, instead writing like I would in notepad.exe and enjoying the clean looks. I guess one could call that kind of hybrid between WYSIWYG and plain text…

There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many

I agree about Obsidian. But Ulysses in my experience isn't WYSIWYG, it's mostly syntax highlighting.

> the trend of markdown apps is to this direction.

Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do.

Which is kind of the point.

then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

No, but there is fun ways to do it. when i used Latx a lot, i had an awk script that wrote the table in my file from a CSV. Also, now i think most data inspection tools (panda and mysql at least, probably others) spit their data in the terminal in markdown form, so its a cpy pasta anyway.

the only issue with markdown is image alignment. And to be honest, WYSIWYG editors are shit at this too. I'd rather not loose my time.

yes, for image alignment latex is best. Sometimes the result is not perfect, but at least you do not have to think about it.

> It's just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

Try writing a table in Emacs Org Mode before you say that!

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