Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 353 posts

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#141

Post by ryang2718 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #58
d-us-vb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this often as an org mode user who uses it exclusively for journaling with none of the GTD features. Org mode was released before markdown by over a year, but never saw the uptake like markdown did, despite being a more featureful syntax. I think that's because org mode was originally a GTD framework for emacs, and the syntax of org files was incidental to doing GTD in plaintext. It didn't get populariz…

When you say "better Emacs support," you're kind of understating things: Org Mode was -- and to a large degree, still is -- tied intimately to Emacs. It was only available in Emacs for years, and if you didn't use Emacs, you probably didn't hear about it for years. As someone who now uses both, I think the syntax between the two is really kind of a wash. I know Org Mode folks who insist that its syntax for links is m…

The key bindings out of the box with something like Doom emacsx is a big selling point too.

I have not been able to get markdown to walk in Vim, anywhere near as well.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#142

Post by chrisweekly »

Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

Amen. Biggest reason I love Obsidian so much; it's like an operating system for markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#143

Post by chrisweekly »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #87
Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then? Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac…

Try Obsidian. Its "LiveView" editor mode is fantastic.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#144

Post by chrisweekly »

esperent wrote: post #120
VerifiedReports wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then? Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac…

There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that. Try copying some markdown into these places: - A reddit comment - Microsoft Teams - Slack - Whatsapp - Discord - Google Docs - Discord - Notion - Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think) Etc.

And Obsidian! Best of them all.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#145

Post by raincole »

Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

It's fundamentally ok-ishly looking text.

I think that is the biggest reason why Markdown doesn't support table. There are alternatives that do (e.g. wikitext) but they didn't get as popular as Markdown. Why? Perhaps it's because that tables will never really look fine in pure text no matter how clever your syntax is.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#146

Post by adamnemecek »

lozf wrote: post #104
pbronez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been enjoying Typst. I worry that much of it is too complex for many end users. I'm musing about having end users draft stuff in markdown, then render that markdown with Typst templates.

Good call, I've had success with: pandoc -f gfm -t typst -o file.typ file.md and as you'll know it's easy to add a Template if required.

Pandoc is cool but I hate writing my own scripts for it.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#147

Post by trollbridge »

raincole wrote: post #145
Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

It's fundamentally ok-ishly looking text. I think that is the biggest reason why Markdown doesn't support table. There are alternatives that do (e.g. wikitext) but they didn't get as popular as Markdown. Why? Perhaps it's because that tables will never really look fine in pure text no matter how clever your syntax is.

Provided you’ve got UTF-8 (or CP437/850/1521 etc) and fixed pitch, it’s easy to make tables.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#148

Post by lelanthran »

Johnny_Bonk wrote: post #62

I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons: It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush) Can do tables (at least…

> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering. Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about?

Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

This is a serious and major drawback of markdown, making it good for developers only. The average person does not want to render code.

Remove that one drawback, and it'll get even better adoption.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#149

Post by lelanthran »

mlok wrote: post #90
NelsonMinar wrote: post #52

I think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.) I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of…

A more intuitive norm, used in other formats, would have been : *bold* /italics/ _underline_

That's exactly what we used in on usenet (except,without rendering unless you were using a nice GUI reader, not just tin/rtin)

The problem is that that's too many characters to reserve (they all have to be escaped when you want the actual character) making the resulting text look awful in plain text mode.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#150

Post by cmrdporcupine »

chuckadams wrote: post #60

The author of CommonMark and Pandoc has a new format called Djot: https://djot.net/ that I've been meaning to check out. Supposedly more sane to parse, and it comes from someone who would definitely know about that sort of thing.

Djot is great. I use it in my project ( client for https://timbran.org/moor.html ). It has all that I needed from markdown without any excess, and it's safe and easy to parse and familiar to people.
Post reply on HN