Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Before I learned the existence of Markdown, the intuitive most logical markup for me was (and after 10+ years of writing Markdown, still is):

* *Asterisks* should be bold. Like WhatsApp and Slack do. Because they bring attention to the eye, marking a strong emphasis, and also because for italics there seem to be a much better alternative.

* /Slash/ should be italics. Young me thought this was so obvious! Because italic text is leaning to the right, just like the slash bar. (Note that with time I ended up realizing that this would be a bad idea because slashes are too commonly used in plain written language. The parser would need to be too clever. But still, seemed nice for a while :-)

* _Underscore_ should be underline. I mean, the name says it all. This is so obvious to me that I never understood how it's not the case. I had been writing _this_ to visualize an underlined word for so much time before learning Markdown, that having it for italics just feels strange.

Anyway. If someone knows some resource about the thought process, discussions, or decisions that were made to adopt the current syntax (especially to decide that _underscore_ should italicize, which feels so strange) please let me know, I love reading about that kind of thing :)

Back when most writers used typewriters, the convention was to use the underscore to mark text that was to be italicized. And because they were using typewriters, they would backspace to the first letter of a word or phrase, then type the underscore under each characters to be italicized. When computers came along, backspace worked differently (back up, replace character with space), so the convention was to start and end the word/phrase with an underscore, _like this_.

Using asterisks for bold is again an adaptation for computers. With typewriters, you could just back up and retype the word/phrase to get a bolder look (maybe a few times to really make it stand out).

Thanks! that was very insightful. In the end, most things end up having an historical reason behind their rationale...

The main problem with slash as italics is that I very often write either file Unix file paths (like /etc/) or lists of alternatives (like vim/emacs/etc), and such markup languages tend to get confused.

I rarely have that issue with * and _, since they only really appear as explicit symbols in code or math which already have other syntax markers.

This is precisely how Org mode works in Emacs, IIRC. Now I'm curious who was the first person to invent this syntax—like you say, it seems like a very natural choice, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't have a long history of some sort.

This is how it was in yee olden times... I've asked a couple time that HN takeone the content boxes of reddit's markdown. What I do with markdown (copying formatting of tables and such super well, is to paste it into the 'Visual Tab' in Rstudio, and then click to the CODE tab and copy the properly formatted markdown, then past that into a reddit comment and get the great formatting that I want.

For example when I have GPTs spit out tables for researching a topic.

https://i.imgur.com/4gIGYLu.png

https://i.imgur.com/DJVhrUr.png

https://i.imgur.com/aTRWN5S.png

As someone else mentioned, this is how Org mode works on Emacs, not only that, but by setting:

    (setq org-hide-emphasis-markers t)

You can hide the markers (*, /, _, etc.) by default, and toggle them with:

    M-x visible-mode

It also has many other features that integrate well with Emacs.

In polite society, underlined text is not a thing.

I'm with you wrt slash for italics, but sometimes you also just want to write a slash... how would you do that? Underscores are good because you never really want to display them...

If you're documenting technical things (what markdown is most commonly used for) underscores need to be displayed all the time because they are common in all sorts of resource and variable names.

Just adding that for technical terms that include underscores, I am on the camp that most if not all of the times they should also be marked as such (as a technical identifier of something) with `backquotes`. Which solves the issue of having unexpected formatting.

I agree, however, than my original naive idea of using slashes was not so good. Obviously some practice gives a better understanding of the problem, and nowadays I see it differently. The slash is too common in written language; it's actually a good thing that unintended italics are not introduced after writing some trivial slashed term in a text, such as "he/him".

Agree on the backquotes

Use / for a slash and use // for //italics// and make *bold* match.

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