191–200 of 328 posts
Markdown is essentially plain text with a couple extra features. I think Markdown’s basic appeal is that it’s plain text.
It is because the primary target for markdown is what would in any other formatting language be the source. Markdown has no source. It is guidelines for good looking plain text layout that when followed can be used to make a typeset document. Everybody sort of knows it sucks as a formatting language. But we love it anyway. The benefit of being able to get a typeset document from a nice looking plaintext document is j…
Your at-rest format allows you to use any tool to edit it. The specialized editor becomes a preferred tool, but not the only tool nor the most important one. Markdown and it's ecosystem came before the editor.
[0]: https://typst.app
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It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a comm…
markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media For those of you who weren't there: *bold* _underline_ ~strikethrough~ /italics/ > Quotation - list - list - list I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.
*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.
What do you all think of Djot?
Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough." We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough! Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the…
For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists. • I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
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Ugh, troff. It's mind-boggling that the closest way to have an actual (hyper)link in a manpage is to use your pager's "search for text" function. No, "JuSt usE gNu iNfO it'S beTtER" is not an answer either.
groff can produce output with links in it, and does by default in HTML mode! The GNU version of the Unix man page macro set has .UR and .UE for “URI start” and “URI end”. (I don't know whether these were present earlier in the lineage or whether they were introduced by GNU.) Also, the lowdown Markdown converter when in man output mode will output those for links. For fun, try: echo 'Hi there! Have a [hyperlink](https…