[themadturk]

> I don't understand why anyone thinks that seeing and editing format codes all over the place is good UX in 2025.

For the same reason they liked it in the UX of 1985 and 1995...because Markdown gives you the ability to actually see the format codes that create your formatting and fix them if they're not what you want.

Now Obsidian (or any other Markdown editor) certainly isn't WordPerfect, but the one thing that diehard WordPerfect users loved was the ability to hit "reveal codes" and gain exacting control over their formatting...something Microsoft Word has never even tried to do. Markdown is far, far simpler, but the same control is there.

[atombender]

The reason I don't buy into this is that it shouldn't be necessary: If I've marked a word as bold, I can see it without format codes. The rendering is the desired outcome. In modern documents there's no kind of magical markup that somehow cannot be visualized "canonically". Format codes are less efficient as a representation because they obscure the "real" representation.

By analogy, to me it's like people preferring to draw by writing SVG, when drawing lines and circles is much more natural in a visual medium. Its not like sheet music where notation describes a completely different medium.