IMO, Notion, for all its sluggishness, nails this part. On the other hand, I think the best thing about markdown is the restrictions to formatting. I wouldn't call requiring a second panel to preview how the actual text will look predictable or simple. > For this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power In 2-panel markdown you need the second panel to see how your final text will look to the rest of the world because you can't predict that easily when writing in an esoteric markup. Huh? In rich text you see what everybody else will see. > you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen Rich text editors are intuitive, that's why they've dominated computing for the last 30-40 years. If you give a 2 panel markdown editor to any non-developer human they will be baffled at how to do any formatting with it. > there are no formatting operations you have to learn After the markup is gone, how do you edit it? How do you unbold something, or change the indentation of a list? If there are separate commands for all that, then there was no point in using Markdown. That's why Markdown tools that hide the markup are, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds: you sacrifice formatting power, and you sacrifice editor predictability. This is not so in rich text editors when you press backspace, it changes both the document and invisible internal state, and you can't easily predict what will happen simply by looking at the screen you need to be aware of the invisible formatting structure, or perhaps a recent history of things you did, or it might be entirely impossible to tell because it depends on some invisible state that was created weeks ago and saved in the document file.įor this huge advantage in predictability and simplicity, Markdown sacrifices formatting power (you can only do a limited set of things like headings, lists, bold, and italic). For example, if you press backspace, you always know exactly what the result will be: it will delete the character to the left of the cursor. The entire state of the document is visible, and there are no formatting operations you have to learn, just regular text editing operations like backspace, copy, paste, and so on. The whole point of Markdown (in my opinion) is that the formatting is a function of text that you can see and edit. When you export, generating markdown is trivial since you're already using a markdown-esque set of options to style your text.įunny that we feel so different about Markdown. H1, H2, H3, etc) but you see what the final text will look like in one view. Notion also solves this by only allowing you to select from semantic HTML styles (ie. The only good implementation of writing in markdown I've seen is Typora or Bear, which abstracts/fades away the markup after you type in a single view. Hell, why don't we create a 3 panel writing view? On the left you can write in binary, in the middle you can see live base64, and on the right you can preview what it will look like to actual humans. Didn't we already solve this with 1980s word processors? But for the love of god, don't make me surround my words in 4 character markup to make them bold, and then show me a second panel next to it so I can "preview" what bold looks like. I can't be the only one who believes this.writing in a 2 panel markdown+preview side-by-side view is just horrible and backwards.Īnd I like the idea of markdown! Of course I want the ability to export to markdown for portability to the web. and other open source note systems I've used all suffer from the same problem: bad writing experience.
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