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Comment by anon7000

5 days ago

I mean, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. You could keep an identical publishing setup and use any text editor on the planet :P

But I honestly despise writing raw markdown in an IDE. If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG -- and Obsidian is an excellent markdown editor, even if you don't use the other features.

My reasons for not liking writing "raw" markdown:

- Long links take up too much space. I put it in text so it'd be hidden

- No syntax highlighting in code blocks

- Text wrapping/font is typically not configured for easy reading of text

- A ton of markdown features are for visual formatting. Highlighting, bold, underline, strike-through, inline code, etc. If you stay in raw IDE no-preview, you never get the visual benefits.

- When I'm using markdown, I'm often mostly reading, and doing some writing, but even when I'm writing, I'm re-reading what I wrote constantly. It's annoying to switch to preview mode. Writing mode in IDEs isn't a pleasant reading experience unless you do a lot of configuration. (depending on the IDE of course)

I mean, writing raw md is fine for tiny little things. But because reading & writing are so linked, I don't like separate modes for each. I want to write in the visual mode I read in.

I find it annoying that I can get stuck in a mode when I am editing and the app is trying to render at the same time (e.g. I write some backticks to make a code block and Obsidian tries to be smart and add the second set and it encapsulates a bunch of lines I don't want it to) but to each their own I suppose. Vscode for what its worth has a preview that you can keep open side by side to see the visuals as you edit.

> If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG

<cough> You didn't grow up with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS with reveal codes on, did you? :)

  • Holy cow! 10 year old me learned word processing first with wordperfect. I looked for reveal codes in other processors for years after that and was always disappointed when I couldn't find it.

    Young me was like "how can you edit a document if you can't see the codes?!" Still to this day I wish I had it in word processors.