YHK - yet another hacker news clone

> If I want to see the original Markdown syntax, I should be able to switch to that view just as easily.

This doesn't really map well to existing document opening conventions, so the author's hypothetical built-in Markdown viewer/editor doesn't really fit into any existing system app. For example, if Apple modified TextEdit.app to open Markdown files in the same way it handles RTF documents, it would cover the formatted display case, but not editing the source. They would have to add some third mode (or build an entirely separate app) to handle switching between Markdown source and formatted views, deal with displaying malformed syntax, etc. Not to mention handling the various differences between Markdown flavors.

I felt the same but if you put it into Claude code Opus 5.5 can build you a program that will open faster than anything you’ve ever used before if you ask for it. I asked for it and it’s instantaneous. Faster than literally any other macOS app.

It opens and displays a markdown file faster than bitwarden’s chrome extension displays its fill UI.

The future is almost here. Formats and so on are on the threshold of irrelevance in the next few years for this kind of consumer use. It’s hard to even tell if the time it takes us to summarize a text will be the time a future agent takes to write a specialized program that extracts what you need from the file. “Native” support will soon be irrelevant.

Even my solution is yesterday’s solution.

Shockingly, I could only find about 3, and all sucked in their own special way.

I have the simplest of requirements: just format it and show it like a PDF. Either the app doesn't remember its position and always restarts in an awkward landscape format, or it insists in showing a "file tree" side bar, no simple file viewer.

I am not sure its that important that its a default. Markdown is primarily and editable format that is easily converted to a readable one - its the inverse of PDF which is a readable format that is hard to edit.

1. There’s no acknowledgement of the rich ecosystem of markdown dialects, which add all sorts of incredible features as simple as inline citations and as complex as full roles and directives. They all need highlighting.

2. There’s author claims to like markdown, but then it becomes clear that they don’t like markdown itself, they just like it being behind a rendered WYSIWYG editor. Which… :( headers should look like headers and tables should look like tables, yes, but not at the cost of removing any of the syntax characters! If you do, you’re sacrificing the whole point of the format: ease of modification.

Clearly their heart is in the right place, though. I absolutely loathe sites that don’t support markdown; there is *zero* reason not to do something _this_ important! ~~I dare say it would be something that the three mods and their uninvolved monarch should go to bed every night feeling ashamed of…~~

⟩ Write me a Markdown file viewer for ${OS} that shows Markdown files as formatted documents by default. A button should toggle between the formatted view and the raw Markdown file as plain text. Work the task to completion and make no mistakes.

Of course, there are services that do that for you, ranging from Hugo to Obsidian Publish. But they all add a level of complexity that you have to manage.

Also, this makes user-level styling much simpler. This is what any “Reading mode” does, but without reverse-engineering the content from a soup of tags and classes.

Mobile computing should be more like desktop computing.

We need a better markup language.

[0] https://github.com/john-marinelli/docm

Yet as you note later there is no such thing as a singular markdown. So why would time do magic here? There is nothing remarkable about bad underspecified system suffering from incompatible variety for decades, computers are littered with examples of those

> One of the original ideas behind Markdown was that a document should remain readable even before a computer interprets its formatting

Which was never true since it includes HTML which you criticize in the very next sentence

> We have spent decades dealing with document formats that behave differently depending on which application created them, which version of the software is installed and which operating system is trying to open them. Markdown should be an opportunity to move in the opposite direction.

Weird, MD has all the same issues, why would it present any opportunities?

How do I teach someone who never opened anything besides excel, word, and powerpoint about markdown? to them the document file is just a document and it opens in word that's mostly what they know for this audience.

Just opening in notepad by default works fine. The point of markdown is that it doesn't need rendering to be readable. If you need more, you already have a preferred Markdown IDE setup anyway.

Markdown is pretty terrible as a rendered format anyway. The standard for Markdown itself is extremely loose so we invented several types of Markdown, indistinguishable from each other with slightly different features and syntax, to cover the loose standard. CommonMark isn't Markdown yet I see nobody saving files as .cm to actually indicate what kind of Markdown they need.

This is a major annoyance in messaging apps, slop tooling, and of course git GUIs. Building a standard viewer will bring all of those problems to the operating system, and for what? To annoy the people who already have a Markdown viewer of choice?

Oh, but Markdown isn’t simple. Easy it is, certainly, but simple it isn’t because of one feature: being able to embed HTML. So the semantics of Markdown subsumes the semantics of HTML, which has a _huge_ spec.

What one’d like in many cases would be a Markdown-without-HTML-embedding. But that’s no longer Markdown.

ez, wish the browsers had nice rendering out of the box and registered themselves as a handler though