Markdown still sucks

When LifeLog launched, @jasonleow and I had a spirited discussion about Markdown. He was all for it, and I was complaining about the lack of a simple graphical editing interface. Now that I’ve written here for over 300 days, I can confidently say that Markdown is not for me. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say if I had to use Markdown to write my newsletter, there would be no Be Wellthy.

Aside from learning the syntax, my biggest issue with Markdown is the lack of real-time formatting. I don’t like the idea that I have to wait to publish my article to see all the formatting. Oh, that’s how big H2 header is?? Nope, need to change it. Oh and I forgot the space after the “#” which you don’t need for other commands. I also almost never type brackets, so the idea that I need to type those for a hyperlink is just one more annoyance. I am a true target of the famed WYSWYG functionality.

All the other writing tools I have used (Medium, Substack, Adagia, Writestreak) offer some graphical editor. The consequence of Markdown-only here is that my posts have minimalist formatting because I just don’t want to bother. By the way, this also makes it less likely that I share writing here because it’s not “ready for prime time.”

One good thing I can say is that I have learned a shortcut that I use all the time. I knew that I could start typing numbers and periods in Word or Outlook and it would generate a list. I did not know that I could type * and start a bulleted list. So that one I’m thankful for because it is definitely faster than selecting the bullet option from the menu.