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…
> that render them as intended Markdown is the intended rendering medium.
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.
Thanks. I don't want to launch an editor and then invoke a preview. I just want to double-click and read the damned file, formatted as intended. It's mystifying that people don't recognize the pointlessness of a markup format that's almost never rendered as the markup dictates.
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…
> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers Huh? Any open-source project on GitHub, at least, has the viewer right there. It's the default view of markdown files. I assume other repos are similar. E.g. The readme https://github.com/jquery/jquery
Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?
And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
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…
> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. Huh? If you find a markdown file in a project on Github, I have every confidence that it renders as intended in Github's markdown viewer.
Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github?
And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.
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…
Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension ( https://tachicode.com/ ). Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.
> It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. Sure, but that's table stakes. There are much better formats: AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, etc. Yet I also primarily use Markdown. I could use a format that's perhaps 20% better, and well-specified. But I'd have to use Markdown somewhere anyway. So I just stick with Markdown. It's good enough for me.
Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.
There are those that have well defined extension points (e.g. TeX, rst), and those that are ad-hoc, of which the best example is markdown. TeX, via packages and wrappers, can do practically anything. rst has directives (blocks) and interpreted text (inline) which can also effectively do anything (along with substitution references which are more macro-like). Specific "interpreters" (for lack of a better term) which you link to naturally have specific features by default (and some are more extensible than others e.g. pandoc which when writing out LaTeX lets you embed LaTeX in the markdown, so "markdown" in this case is turing complete).
I think if you define "better" as having well-defined extensibility to enable multiple implementations (i.e. not ad-hoc things pandoc lets you do), then rst (which can be transformed into XML as per https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/doctree.html) would be "better" than markdown.
I like Markdown, and generally agree that it strikes a nice balance between correctness and usability... ...but it's delicious that this blog post also demonstrates an ambiguity in Markdown: how to handle intra-word emphasis. In the rendered output, "mark_up_" and "mark_down_" were probably intended to be "mark up " and "mark down ", but the underscores were instead rendered literally. I do appreciate that Markdown's…
I actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?
Alas! Once again, I’ve learned what happens when I assume.
> It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. Sure, but that's table stakes. There are much better formats: AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, etc. Yet I also primarily use Markdown. I could use a format that's perhaps 20% better, and well-specified. But I'd have to use Markdown somewhere anyway. So I just stick with Markdown. It's good enough for me.
Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.
Does anything need all those features though? If you need more than headings, bold, italic, quoted text, and code, you should probably be using HTML or Latex or something. So a better goodness-of-fit function would be is it easy to remember/use, and is it non-intrusive inline with the text?