[bobbylarrybobby]

Bear’s implementation is great. One thing I hate about rich text is that it's basically impossible to not inherit the formatting of adjacent text if you move your cursor around, nor is it possible to see the current formatting state. If your cursor is between whitespace and an italic word, will inserted text be normal or italic? Markdown’s formatting characters solve this by creating a boundary that the cursor can be on either side of.

[eviks]

This is a solved problem, but not implemented almost nowhere. Your text cursor can simply show whether text is going to be italic with an indicator. And moving cursor an extra step away from the italicized word will reset the formatting to that of the space char. But also panels in many apps show current formatting in their formatting button state

[mdeeks]

Interesting, because I find that very intuitive. If my cursor is on or next to formatting, it'll inherit it.

I find formatting after the fact a lot easier too. Bold a line? cmd+shift-right and then cmd+b. Trying to add formatting after the fact with markdown isn't fun. Though many editors try to helpfully insert markdown for you with hotkeys, it often fails on multi-line things.

[bobbylarrybobby]

What does “next to formatting” mean? There's always some formatting on both sides of the cursor.