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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't write file paths. Only a concern for programmers, who should be fine escaping them by whatever mechanism.

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Most people don’t write markdown! What’s the demographic of markdown writers who don’t write file paths? Bloggers?

this may be a huge number, because Evernote and a lot of note applications relying on markdown.

> Evernote

Since when?

I apologise, I confused it.

Notion users, Reddit users, etc.

I will say that forward slashes are still more common in regular english text even among non-programmers than underscores. For example, listing options a/b/c.

And you know, URLs.

I don’t really think of Notion as “markdown” but I suppose you’re right since we support a bunch of markdown conventions. Some things are different though like `> ` is a toggle block, and `” ` a quote block. Unfortunately we already abuse / for a command menu, which is by far my least favorite feature. I want to make a setting to disable it but it goes against our anti-settings philosophy.

Uh.. what about all those non programmers that write URLs?

I think many/most people use slashes more often than they use asterisks, however.

Sure, but a slash before and after a word? I don’t think that’s common outside of file paths.

Not even common including file paths, unless you mean directory paths. Even then, only necessary if you really want to unambiguously indicate a directory in the path itself.

Using slashes for a short/small/abbreviated list is relatively common. For example, the top post on the hiring thread right now is for a "Full-stack/frontend/product engineer". There's another one describing a "M/W/Th" hybrid schedule.

And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace.

> "And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace."

Only if the intent is for the URL to be copy/pasted, otherwise you enclose the URL in <url> or [text](url) to make it clickable.

Most markdown implementations make URLs clickable without the angle brackets.

no, but most people definitely use links in their texts and they have the same problem. / is also regularly used for fractions or/and in a situation where you could use two words

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