[nickloewen]

Suppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold.

* I had to escape all of these asterisks.

** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Disappearing asterisks is just terrible UX. It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal.

The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.

[eviks]

> It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal.

This is just terrible UI, why do you need garbage marks when you already have bold? And you can edit "as normal" if you like, but that only requires displaying asterisks during that tiny % of time you edit the word, not all the time when you read it or edit something else.

[localuser13]

This is just a personal preference. I strongly prefer to see the markup as I write it. I can't stand disappearing characters.

[eviks]

Do you enable visibility of tab and space?

[reaperducer]

I do!

[duskdozer]

So you can still see the actual text that you're editing. And to reduce ambiguity. If you don't leave them, then you can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately after

[eviks]

> So you can still see the actual text that you're editing

But you're not editing that text! You're editing some other text and see a bunch of asterisks all over the place. And this is especially bad in nested styles - try some colored bold word in a table cell - without hiding the markup you'll basically lose most of visibility into the text/table layout

> to reduce ambiguity

it does the opposite, you can't easily distinguish between an asterisk and an asterisk, which is... ambiguity

> can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately

Sure you can. In a well-designed editor you'll see the style indicator right near your caret is so it's always obvious whether and how your typed text is styled or not.

In a not-so-well-designed editor you'll get that indicator far away from your caret or just get asterisks appearing when you need them.

In a not-designed editor you'll see them all the time even when they don't serve any purpose.

[saltcured]

Ha, I remember this religious debate all the way back in the days of text-mode word processing in the 80s on CP/M and PC. I was indoctrinated in the WordStar camp where style controls were visible in the editor between actual text characters, so you could move the cursor between them and easily decide to insert text inside or outside the styled region. This will forever seem a more coherent editing UI to me.

This might be why I also liked LaTeX. The markup itself is semantic and meant to help me understand what I am editing. It isn't just some keyboard-shortcut to inject a styling command. It is part of the document structure.

[eviks]

> easily decide to insert text inside or outside the styled region.

Only for the 3 primitive styles that were supported? 3 table cells of RedBold GreenLowerCaps BlueUnderlineItalic isn't easy anymore

But also - there wasn't a single app in the 80s with a different easy approach, right? So removing noise had a downside.

> styling command. It is part of the document structure.

Not for the most used markdown markers, where styling = semantic.

[eszed]

Same, same.

And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.

[registeredcorn]

What ought, amn't

[roblh]

For the love of god, yes. Slack is the worst for this with backticks. Editing the start/end points is a giant pain.