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Comment by godelski

6 years ago

There's always these "Markdown got X wrong posts" and they seem to be very browser centric.

You know how I use Markdown 99% of the time? Vim. I LOVE that it is simple and easy to read in a text editor. I spend a lot of my time in the terminal and that's WHY I use Markdown. If I wanted fancy things that display better in a browser, I'll use something else. I look at Markdown as great because they kept it simple. I can read it easily in vim and I can have some nice features in a browser (i.e. my GitHub repos don't look like they're from 1995. But they also don't look like a Geocities nightmare).

I use Markdown to document code. I use it to keep notes. I use it to track tasks. Etc. It is my digital pen and paper BECAUSE it is simple, because I can read it in the terminal just as easily as I can read it on the web.

Keep Markdown simple.

9 comments

godelski

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swyx  6 years ago

I think your mental accounting of saying you use Markdown 99% of the time in Vim is primarily when you alone are concerned.

But consider also that you are "using" Markdown when you read Markdown written by others, on documentation, in a browser. A wholistic accounting would probably move Markdown higher than 1% of your time!

  • godelski  6 years ago

    If it wasn't clear, let me be. Absurdly high numbers typically indicate exaggerations.

loeg  6 years ago

I also mostly edit Markdown in vim.

I hate that I have no idea how it will render on Github or wherever without actually pushing a test commit out, or using Github's interactive UI + copypaste to preview.

There's a bunch of command line tools and libraries implementing a variety of incompatible supersets of markdown.

Anyway, you can write Markdown-style plaintext documents without trying to conform to Markdown. The point of markdown is to be able to render those straightforward documents as pretty web pages without the degree of uglifying and boilerplate markup that HTML requires.

thayne  6 years ago

I also use markdown in vim a lot, and some of these "things it got wrong" make it worse, because you end up having to use html to do things like tables. or numbered lists aren't actually numbered in order, etc.

I'm actually surprised the absence of tables didn't make this list.