I can’t stand “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) character formatting.
For the uninitiated, let me first explain what this is. WYSIWYG character formatting is when stylings — such as bold and italics — are applied to characters without the use of any characters. These character stylings can be applied before and after typing characters. If you opt to select your character stylings before you type characters, you can typically select your desired stylings from a menu or use a keyboard shortcut corresponding to the stylings you’d like to toggle on. Character stylings can be applied after typing characters by selecting the characters you’d like to style and then applying your desired stylings using any of the methods previously mentioned.
One problem with both of these methods is that they require you to interrupt your typing flow. In contrast, traditional Markdown text styling allows you to style text by typing characters.
Another problem with WYSIWYG formatting is contagious formatting; if your cursor touches a formatted character, characters you type from that cursor’s position will “catch” the formatting of the adjacent character. If you didn’t want this to happen, you have to change the formatting using one of the aforementioned methods. This behavior becomes all the more obnoxious if your cursor touches an invisible formatted character, such as a space. In this scenario, you have little to no way of knowing what format a character you type is going to inherit. With Markdown character formatting, it’s clear which formatting settings are being applied to which character groups.
Markdown apps like iA Writer — my favorite Markdown text editor — give you the best of both worlds by applying the character formatting that corresponds to the characters you wrap a group of characters with without obfuscating the characters used to apply said formatting.
For the uninitiated, let me first explain what this is. WYSIWYG character formatting is when stylings — such as bold and italics — are applied to characters without the use of any characters. These character stylings can be applied before and after typing characters. If you opt to select your character stylings before you type characters, you can typically select your desired stylings from a menu or use a keyboard shortcut corresponding to the stylings you’d like to toggle on. Character stylings can be applied after typing characters by selecting the characters you’d like to style and then applying your desired stylings using any of the methods previously mentioned.
One problem with both of these methods is that they require you to interrupt your typing flow. In contrast, traditional Markdown text styling allows you to style text by typing characters.
Another problem with WYSIWYG formatting is contagious formatting; if your cursor touches a formatted character, characters you type from that cursor’s position will “catch” the formatting of the adjacent character. If you didn’t want this to happen, you have to change the formatting using one of the aforementioned methods. This behavior becomes all the more obnoxious if your cursor touches an invisible formatted character, such as a space. In this scenario, you have little to no way of knowing what format a character you type is going to inherit. With Markdown character formatting, it’s clear which formatting settings are being applied to which character groups.
Markdown apps like iA Writer — my favorite Markdown text editor — give you the best of both worlds by applying the character formatting that corresponds to the characters you wrap a group of characters with without obfuscating the characters used to apply said formatting.