That live rendering exists is in itself a sign that we want more than plaintext. On its own, plaintext is simple, which is why we like it. And it shoves everything directly in your face, which is also why we like it. But many of us also want more than just plaintext, so we invented markup, to add some levels of richness. But this makes it complicated again, and the more we want, the harder it gets, the less support from the tools we have.
Obsidian is now in a space where many people want something more richful, with elaborated data-handling, charts, pictures, videos, code-fragments with syntax highlighting, execution of code-framgments, and so on. The scale of demand is far more than just plaintext, or simple markup, and the tooling can't fetch up at the moment, because anything becomes very dirty and hacky around the higher abilities and more specialized workflows.
And then there is the problem of documentation and learning, which with plaintext is always a big problem, because everything depends on your input. With richtext-interfaces, you have an environment whose whole purpose is to support you in inputing and manipulating which ever richful text/object you want. So they simply scale up better. Which brought me to the realization that a modern environment around richtext and objects is what I really need. Because it's simple to level down richtext, but hard to level up plaintext.
> That live rendering exists is in itself a sign that we want more than plaintext.
If people would just finally realize that this especially applies to code!
It's imho a complete joke that we're still using plain text for source code, and convert it back and forth between it's actual structure (an AST) and some limited and quirky textual representation.
The text representation of code should be just that: A visual representation. Not "the real thing".
Having proper rich data structures for code instead of plain text would make so much more possible given some proper editors…
Everyone is re-inventing "show codes" from Wordperfect 5 and other similar platforms because no one who is inventing these things has ever used Wordperfect 5. That said, re-solving this problem is turning up some nice new U/X patterns that (as far as I know) weren't around in the older platforms ("show codes on cursor", "local modal editing for format", etc.)
Guessing what they mean by show codes on cursor. Showing markdown around the cursor is now in Obsidian, but previously it was in Typora, FoldingText, and a circa 2016 web app called "usecanvas":
Obsidian's editor is "show codes on cursor" by default. As you navigate through the rich text expression it changes to the markdown format that produces that expression. You're always in a line / block of Markdown, but the rest of the document is rendered.
"local modal editing" is most often seen in richer IDE experiences like Darklang v0.2's IDE and the Hazel type-directed-holes experiments.
There are more interesting takes as well (Lighttable's live forms, lots of Vic's experiments) but I'm definitely seeing more instances of the first two experiences these days.
Probably referring to the limitations of Markdown? Not sure what Markdown flavor Obsidian supports, some extensions (e.g. tables) are quite powerful...
Obsidian is now in a space where many people want something more richful, with elaborated data-handling, charts, pictures, videos, code-fragments with syntax highlighting, execution of code-framgments, and so on. The scale of demand is far more than just plaintext, or simple markup, and the tooling can't fetch up at the moment, because anything becomes very dirty and hacky around the higher abilities and more specialized workflows.
And then there is the problem of documentation and learning, which with plaintext is always a big problem, because everything depends on your input. With richtext-interfaces, you have an environment whose whole purpose is to support you in inputing and manipulating which ever richful text/object you want. So they simply scale up better. Which brought me to the realization that a modern environment around richtext and objects is what I really need. Because it's simple to level down richtext, but hard to level up plaintext.