Yeah, *asterisks* for italic has always felt wrong to me. I can understand underscores if slashes cause confusion with file paths.
*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.
*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.
As for /slashes/, which would visually be perfect for italics, the only reason they conflict between italics and filepaths is the fact that in both cases they are expected to be used at the beginning and end of a word. Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics.
Markdown was created in an era before the web had easily used components for structural syntax highlighting (tree-sitter) and where reliance on regex-based approaches was more common.
Using different delimiter for opening and closing is a good idea on its own, too. I think it makes parsing simpler and unambiguous wrt nesting.
I've imagined something like this:
`(monospace)
_(underline)
/(italics)
~(overstrike)
O, c'mon! That is clearly a giant heading in a display font, squeezed in the middle and wider at the top and bottom. (-;