> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.

> Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.

You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.

There are also the multitude of people that use markdown in chat applications, which usually implement a form of WYSIWYG editing, e.g., Slack.

Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after -<Space>.

There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.

Because it’s still not Markdown, not by a long shot. https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#basics may call it “mrkdwn”, but it bears only a very superficial resemblance to Markdown—in significant chunks it’s closer to one or two other lightweight markup languages than to Markdown.

Have you tried recently? There was a period when I also had WYSIWYG enabled solely because markdown links weren't working for me, but that's been fixed (at least for me) for a while now.

Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.

A few years ago, Slack was "plain text entry box for markdown"

In ~2019, it changed to "WYSIWYG with markdown converted to WYSIWYG as you type". If you type "Hello *world*" the * will disappear and the "world" will be bolded - and you can also get bold with Ctrl+B or pressing a 'bold' button or pasting bold rich text.

There's an option to disable it [1], so if your slack experience is different you might have WYSIWYG disabled.

And if you think markdown usually means *foo* producing italics, and **foo** for bold, all I can say is yes.

[1] https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1201955273667158023?lang=...

Yes I disabled the WYSIWYG editor the day it landed.

The exact syntax of bold/italics is just a flavor... "markdown" as a design pattern vs. "Markdown" as a specific implementation or specification.

> the trend of markdown apps is to this direction.

Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do.

Which is kind of the point.

then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

No, but there is fun ways to do it. when i used Latx a lot, i had an awk script that wrote the table in my file from a CSV. Also, now i think most data inspection tools (panda and mysql at least, probably others) spit their data in the terminal in markdown form, so its a cpy pasta anyway.

the only issue with markdown is image alignment. And to be honest, WYSIWYG editors are shit at this too. I'd rather not loose my time.

yes, for image alignment latex is best. Sometimes the result is not perfect, but at least you do not have to think about it.

> It's just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

Try writing a table in Emacs Org Mode before you say that!

There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many

These are very well rated apps in the iOS app store, and does one really need to question who is using Notion vs. firing up an editor? One of the use cases of Notion is to quickly publish an easily imported/exported blog or website, which is very much in line with the point of markdown.

I don't know all of your mentioned apps that well, but the ones I know just hide the markdown and provide shortcuts and buttons to insert it. I for one almost never use the shortcuts or syntax insertion buttons in Bear, instead writing like I would in notepad.exe and enjoying the clean looks. I guess one could call that kind of hybrid between WYSIWYG and plain text…

I agree about Obsidian. But Ulysses in my experience isn't WYSIWYG, it's mostly syntax highlighting.

Your first two points are misleading:

1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places.

Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used  for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically.

2. The article was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.

I make markdown tables by hand. Very simple ones. And simple is good.

Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…”

There are lots of tables in markdown. I’m not sure how you definitively know if they are made by hand or cut and pasted from a helper tool.

Anyway, it’s a dumb argument to make. The beauty of markdown is that if you don’t understand something, just don’t use it. It’s not like there are many tables in blog posts or comments any way.

> Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…”

You know exactly what the intended meaning is, because it’s a common idiom. For example, “nobody goes there anymore.” This is pseudopedantry just like intentionally misinterpreting phrases of the form “this or that” as nonexclusive disjunctions is. It can be used humorously, but taken seriously it’s just tiresome.

I have to disagree strongly with this response.

I do not think the post you are replying to, intended any sort of humor and I also think they made a correct and important point. I would have posted if they had not already done so.

I tried to use a markdown table editor and found it was easier to make it by hand. to each their own I guess.

If you include Slack's Markdoon then they default to the WYSIWYG editor so probably > 1%.

Slack has nothing to do with Markdown. The plain text that its text box turns into formatting bears no resemblance whatsoever, and I don’t believe you can interact with it as lightweight markup anyway.

The page you linked says "This formatting is similar to Markdown markup" so it has something to do with it. Given paragraphs, quotes, lists, and code are interchangeable it is certainly regrettably that links, bold, and italic are different but *bold* vs **bold** is still a meaningful resemblance in my book.

Similarities: _…_ for italics, `…` for code, ```…``` for multiline code (… though this is an unofficial syntax not part of Markdown, though it’s very close to ubiquitous), <…> for delimiting URLs, a > prefix for quotes (which is the most common syntax by far, since it was established decades earlier in email), and entity-encoding of &, < and > for some reason (which, given that they don’t support any other entity-encoding, and don’t use the ampersand, and don’t support escaping any of the rest of the syntax, is all-round weird, like although they weren’t actually following Markdown anywhere else they decided to in this one place for some reason and made a total hash of it).

The only similarities that are not extremely common conventions independent of any specific lightweight markup language are triple-backtick code fences, and entity-encoding.

Differences: no paragraphs, line breaks are hard rather than soft breaks, *…* for bold (in Markdown that’s italics, and **…** or __…__ is bold), lists (apparently this syntax doesn’t actually support lists, driving home how this isn’t even Slack’s “normal” format—I’m not sure how lists are actually implemented, given that you can produce them in the web UI), links, strikethrough, emojification, and all the other stuff from Markdown that’s missing (including any other form of escaping or entity-encoding).

Seriously, the resemblance is very superficial. The name is the part that’s closest, by a considerable margin; not the actual language.

They say “similar to Markdown” because that’s the best-known lightweight markup language, so it’s the obvious reference point.

> Markdown will never get beyond developers.

My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.

We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.

I also used git to manage changes.

This was 2009.

He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.

Fast forward to today.

My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).

Not in LaTex but in Markdown.

It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.

It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).

I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.

Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.

After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.

I think there is a business opportunity here.

Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.

have you tried monsterwriter?

- It is a what you see is what you mean editor - It supports some markdown annotations to support your writing flow - it exports in LaTeX, Markdown - It creates a PDF based on LaTeX and allows to choose a template with some configurations

>>My partner is writing her PhD thesis [...] in Markdown.

Is she though? Markdown doesn't even have image captions or like support for citations.

I think you if you use something like pandoc it allows to at markups for centering and citation refs, which I'm guessing was used for .md => .tex to .pdf. But they will be rendered plain text in makrdown preview

MD => .tex to .pdf works with citations, but when I last used it I still had to write the tables in pure latex. With any even vaguely complex figures or subfigures, I had to resort to latex. The bulk of the text could be in MD, but I had to write non-trivial portions in latex.

[something interesting][JoBloggs1996]

[JoBloggs1996]: ISBN:12356789 “Whatever you want to be the title text of the link here”

Random question, why is she branching? Why doesn't she just commit straight to master?

When she is unsure about a re-structuring of part of the thesis she makes a branch. It happened twice so far.

Same reasoning for branching when your are single author of a repo. containing code, I guess. A major refactor or structural code change or trying sth. "crazy".

My partner wrote her Social Science dissertation in LaTeX and also used branches. They are particularly helpful when you hand out a version to others for feedback or proof reading while still working on the document yourself.

I was using md for nearly all of my works in college. But beyond that, something complex like PhD thesis I cannot even imagine the workflow. Really interested to know more details.

How about Google Docs?

> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.

Afaik GitHub and Stackoverflow use markdown WYSIWYG editors. That'd cover a big chunk of users.

You're incorrect. They include buttons for generating some markdown and a separate preview option but at the end of the day, people are writing markdown. I feel pretty certain that most people who use either of those tools regularly eventually learn the syntax and just type it out because it's faster

> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor.

That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG

Ah, I see that now, Source Mode vs Live Preview. But either way you're not using a toolbar and mouse for basic formatting and it's not hiding invisible control codes from you as you edit like in a standard WYSIWYG editor. The sort of things that make Word documents so hard to edit.

Even in Live Preview mode, every character is visible when the cursor is in the area.

> > Markdown will never get beyond developers

I mean here we are using markdown in hacker news comments where there won't even be any formatting.

But before "new reddit", everyone was using Markdown in reddit as well. And no, not everyone who uses reddit is a programmer

>Markdown will never get beyond developers.

considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.