So generally I'm a big fan of plaintext for note taking and mocking stuff up - even if a document ends up a bit more formatted in Word or whatever eventually, I usually start with just plain text.

... at least I did, until I caught the obsidian.md bug, and now all my note taking and document prototyping tends to happen in markdown.

Would this overlap overmuch with HTML? It's just a different flavour of markup really, but very much hits a sweet spot for me - HELLO! seems overly aggressive, <strong>Hello!</strong> is a lot of typing, but **Hello!** is a very happy medium. Being able to just casually drop `bits of code` inline is nice, and

```js
const largerBlocksOfCode = 'also nice';
```

(Firki feels closer to 'why don't you just HTML then' to me)

I suppose the argument could go - markdown by nature, and this is one of the things I love about it, is markup that kind of just looks like human-readable text - like - which reads better:

<ul>
<li>apple</li>
<li>bread</li>
<li>cheese</li>
</ul>

or

- apple
- bread
- cheese

you know?

Anyway just curious whether anyone else has these markdown feelings.

Hmm, I use markdown a lot for both work and my own notes, but as a creative medium I feel it's a bit... lacking? That is to say, there's not that much benefit over plaintext in my opinion. If interesting text formatting is part of the art, I feel like HTML is better suited. There are markdown to html converters people can use to assist with this.

You could also just have plaintext battles which stipulate you should use markdown in the bitpack.

But maybe I am being too negative, maybe there is untapped creative potential within the limited tools of markdown. Perhaps you could start with a plaintext/HTML battle with a "use markdown" bitpack, and see what people come up with.

I like the idea! I think it would fit well as a mid-weight format between the simple plain text and pdf that gives tons of formatting options.

What I'm more enthusiastic about is that you can make bitpacks for XHBs that participant can then edit and complete. It's very awkward to do with pdf and quite limited with plain text. I'm sure this can lead to a lot of very creative bitpacks (and fun battles!)

My only doubt with markdown is that your obligated to type code (as simple as this code is). To me, plain text and pdf feel more accessible in that regard as you don't have to learn any syntax to use these. I guess a well written lyceum article about Markdown basics should fix this problem.

Also in all fairness there's nothing stopping me from simply submitting markdown to plaintext contests. 🤷‍♂️

I don't really see what this offers that can't be done in .html or .pdf - it'd be a bit like splitting pixel format into pixel-psd and pixel-pdn instead of just using Photoshop or Paint.NET and saving to .GIF/.PNG/.BMP/.JPG (the best Pixel format btw).

I appreciate the appeal of doing things in markdown, don't get me wrong, but it's way more "toolset" than "format" in my mind.

If you expect people to see the markdown code in a text editor I'd say yes? But if it's for the formatted output I don't think it would really fit to the plain text format, maybe it would be better to convert it to html or pdf and use it for one of these formats

Yeah, what defines the plain text format is that it's plain text. Lack of bold/italic/underline/size is what separates it from .pdf.

pdf is already a Very Rare Format, i wouldn't be in favour of splitting it up.

Markdown is nice. I like it.

I checked out Obsidian. Please be careful of vendor lock-in and feel free to resurrect this thread when the chickens come home to roost. In the meantime, there is plenty of Free software to scratch your markdown itch—including Vim or [https://github.com/joeyespo/grip](Grip).

Agree on vendor lock-in, but Vim's strengths imo don't particularly come into play when doing markdown (unless "ease of use for one already familiar with Vim" counts, but in that case it would be a redundant recommendation), and Grip is streamlined for one very specific thing - creating README.md files for github projects - and anything outside that specific situation is really unwieldy. Doable, but a bit like eating soup with a butterknife.

I'd look at KeenWrite (BSD license) or MarkText (MIT - Corporate Memphis trigger warning on the official website, though the Github is fine) for simple, straightforward "see what markdown looks like as you enter it" environments, and if you're wedded to Vim or Emacs or Notepad++ or, I don't know, Bank Street Writer, just copy-paste to an online displayer like https://markdownlivepreview.com/ or something.

firki markup format wohooooo

(np++ has a couple markdown preview pane plugins, iirc)

on that note though the purist in me is clamoring to clarify - we're used to thinking of markup as leading to a particular visual styling, because that's the most common / accessible way to communicate context in text; but markup is not necessarily about presentation of content, it's about context of content. Yes the usual method is to use the context provided by markup to inform the presentation, but you want to avoid thinking that

<h1>this text is big and bold</h1>

or

# this text is big and bold

because it's not - that text is contextually marked as a header, nothing more. headers can be big and bold, but they can also easily not be:

<h1 style="font-size:unset;font-weight:unset;">this header is neither big nor bold</h1>

so previewing what your markup would look like when rendered by default is useful, same as previewing HTML in default browser styles is useful - but there is an art to how you define context, and -

...man maybe I don't even want to have a md format, I just want to rant about markup for a while 😵 thank you all for coming to my ted talk though, appreciate it.