6 ms·
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about
by vijucat 1y ago
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
- simonw 1y agoThe more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown: - I can transform it to other formats should I need to - The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take - Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed! - I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format - LLMs are great at reading and writing it These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a nerd!
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y agoIndeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agosir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical ideas