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Comment by rane | Hacker News Reader

What's with the markdown craze? I get the usefulness in software development – plain text matters for diffs, and everyone's got their favorite editor.

But when it comes to note-taking apps, wouldn't a WYSIWYG approach, where markdown is kept out of sight, be more user-friendly?

Take Obsidian, for example. It has this clunky live preview feature where the line you're working on keeps morphing into markdown. Super awkward.

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I think it's because it's relatively simple to make an note taking app or system, and everyone has an opinion on how to take notes, so you end up with a proliferation of note apps, and a bunch of fake innovation.

Also, software developers are naturally biased against Microsoft Office. For no good reason.

> Also, software developers are naturally biased against Microsoft Office. For no good reason.

I don't know any individual's reason for being biased for or against anything, but I think that, if the claim is that there is no good reason to be biased against Microsoft Office, then that's false. My personal gripe is that Office's approach is just fundamentally antithetical to the idea that I know what I want to do with my document better than Office itself does; it's always trying to guess and, for a recent infuriating example, getting a bulleted list to indent the way that I want it can be an epic battle.

I am continually surprised by how much of the modern offices of America run on excel.

My favorite feature is when you ever so slightly click to the edge of a cell in the middle of a 10,000,000 line csv file, it warps you to the bottom of the page and selects the last cell so you can't find you way back. Best design decision ever!

Another favorite feature was auto-detect formatting. If it could read it as anything other than plain text it would default to dates, times, whatever it found... only recently (2023) was this "AMAZING" feature given a switch to turn it off...

Thankfully I don't have to interact with word. Thar be dragons.

I like side-by-side. That was how TeXStudio worked (TeX on the left, rendered PDF on the right), and VSCode does the same thing with its Markdown previews

I prefer Obsidian and Sublime Text for notetaking because they are much snappier than Word, plain text files are easier to recover if they get corrupted, and I don't like Office trying to get me to save to OneDrive. I also find them easier to customize.

I do use Microsoft's OneNote and Word, just not for everyday notes.

Marktext provides that if you wish. For me, though, writing with a few simple codes makes the whole process easier. And then there's the fact that Markdown can be easily converted to whatever format you want with pandoc.

Of course it would, but since when has the lack of use friendliness ever stopped anyone? (though some editors do hide markup in markdown)

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