holly molly
Is it just me, or does the whole concept of “visually editing Markdown” seem… contradictory?
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It’s just you. 
In all seriousness, I would usually agree with you, but tables in markdown are incredibly fussy and often quite difficult to parse visually when longer text blocks are present.
I welcome this novelty from our visual UI overlords.
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I think of Markdown (or any markup language) as something I’m doing for the machines, not for me, even though we both can read it. While I’m more than comfortable reading and writing in Markdown without a live preview—probably thanks to half a decade using 1980s word processors like WordStar with “reveal codes” toggled on—it’s an extra bit of cognitive load I could often do without, especially for gnarlier things like tables.
An aside: I think things like Markdown and Mac Terminal don’t feel particularly alien to those of us who came of computer age in the era of WordStar and the DOS prompt.
Because I’m in procrastinate mode, I gave Panda a little test drive. It’s simple and pretty—a junior version of Typora, perhaps.
I’ll stick with Typora, though, which is as simple to use but much more fully-featured. (And a bargain at $14.99 for a one-time purchase.)
Which is probably why the original never had them. I do think Markdown has been bent into all sorts of shapes it should not have been.
I generally dislike Markdown for anything more than very basic emphasis, bulleted lists, and titles. Even those annoy me because I think Gruber made poor choices. Especially given wiki markups existed that did it better.
Again… entirely not the original point of Markdown — it has taken on the life of a rock star when all it wanted was to play guitar in the bedroom.
I didn’t start on DOS, but I did start right around 1981. It’s not that things like Markdown are alien it’s that we have so many other ways to do things now. As I understand it, the point of Markdown is that you don’t need special software during writing, yet what we are seeing is a ton of special software for writing Markdown.
My preferred writing tool is Ulysses, but I don’t really care that it’s using Markdown. Sure, I can quickly type a few characters to get the basic formatting I mentioned above, but the same is true in the Wordpress editor, and it does not store the Markdown, it converts it on the fly while typing. I’d just as happily press Cmd-B for bold, etc.
But wasn’t the point of Markdown to provide a lightweight, platform-agnostic alternative to html—i.e., a way of telling the machine how to render your document—and not to fashion a writing tool that was ideal for humans? That’s what I meant by my comment. Markdown doesn’t help me write better, it helps me talk to the rendering engine more easily.
I use Markdown more as a tool to organize shorter, uncomplicated documents like notes; summaries; simple outlines; brief, informative documents and the like that most of the tools I use can render as a readable document in a way that makes the structure clear. For me, headings are about organizational hierarchy, not a way of making the text pretty; in other words, the formatting serves the meaning. I can write in any plain text application on any platform and know that the document is portable, close to future-proof, and can be rendered in as uniform or whimsical a style as my text might require when paired with a good CSS file.
Markdown is an excellent tool if you’re collaborating on a straightforward document where a uniform style and hierarchy are a must: the team can focus on producing clean and well organized text; someone else can build the CSS that will take care of the style.
I wish I could convince everyone I collaborate on text with to use a Markdown editor instead of Word and its fully-featured word-processing brethren. Few people have really taken the time to learn Word’s organizing and formatting tools that make collaboration easier, and with good reason—they’re fussy and counterintuitive. Trying to wrangle conflicting inline formatting—e.g., two people indenting with spaces, one person indenting with tabs, and a third indenting with a paragraph style—into a coherent and editable document has broken me more than once.
If it takes a good editor that abstracts away the gnarlier bits of syntax to make the adoption of Markdown as a collaborative writing tool easier, that’s fine with me. And if Markdown has graduated from playing guitar alone in the bedroom to playing in a garage band, that’s fine with me too.
PS: In many cases tables are more than a nice-to-have, they’re essential to the clear presentation of information. Markdown needed them, even if Gruber didn’t.
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I think we’re coming at the same thing from different directions.
I would contend if your intent is not to convert to HTML (using John’s Perl engine or any alternative) then you’re stuck with “a plain text formatting syntax” which must, by definition, be for the humans.
Now… add images, tables, and more and it loses that intent. It no longer looks "like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions”.
Respectfully, I disagree. How is using that “plain-text formatting system” to convert the text to, say, a docx file with a table make it any more for humans than converting it to an html file with a table? I suppose one might argue that html is itself a markup language and that somehow makes the situation different, but I still think that marking up plain text so that a machine can render it as instructed is something you’re doing for the machine, no matter how easy it is for a human to read.
I also think one can argue that if we were starting from scratch we might come up with something a bit more elegant than Markdown, but at this point I suspect it’s like the QWERTY keyboard: we’re kind of stuck with it.
In any event, I don’t think it’s a violation of the basic principle behind Markdown if a developer inserts a GUI between the user and the syntax to smooth their path a little. It’s faster if you’ve got the symbols under your fingertips, but even though I do, I’m not above mousing up to the edit menu and making a selection from time to time. I’ve also set up Alfred snippets for things I use a lot, like checkboxes.
I’ve embraced Markdown because like the flexibility of writing something in Markdown and being able to convert it to another format as needed via apps like Marked 2, Typora, Pandoc, or even Drafts.
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+1 love of Markdown.
I used to be a heavy user of Bear until moving to Obsidian, which added visual editing of Markdown tables a while back, if anyone is looking for another option. I just used the table editor moments ago to plan out my Christmas presents and it worked beautifully. 
As for the merit of visual editing of Markdown… it was quite handy to be able to paste the Markdown into Claude and have it add and organize my gifts, and then to copy the table back into Obsidian and go back to working with the content without messing with the Markdown syntax. Sure, I could’ve used a spreadsheet, but that would’ve been overkill. And raw Markdown tables are a hassle to work with.
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Then we must agree to disagree.
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You can break free from this one 
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Alas, only at a computer I control.
I fantasize about a universal command that could toggle any keyboard layout to any other keyboard layout.
And yes, I realize it’s straightforward to change the keyboard layout on one’s own personal device—I’m thinking of something you can do on the fly on ANY machine.
Of course it means being able to touch-type in your desired layout irrespective of what the letters and symbols on the keys say, but I’ve already done that and it’s not particularly hard to do. (I can touch-type the Cyrillic alphabet on a Latin alphabet keyboard; it took me about a week to get it under my fingers. It amuses me no end when I’ve forgotten to switch my keyboard layout back to the Latin English layout and the search box will transliterate the term into what it suspects I meant to type there.)
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I like markdown and use it heavily at work for short emails. I will often have tables in the emails. I find that markdown tables are difficult to write and parse. This is quite the opposite of how markdown is supposed to work. But markdown tables are easier to manipulate than RTF tables.
To manage tables:
- I use table flip
- there are numerous csv to markdown convertors
- with LLMs the task of transforming text to markdown tables is trivial, this is my new power tool. I will still use TableFlip for the final edits, but it is easy to change or add to the table using ChatGPT or Claude.
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I asked Gemini for some CSV converters and they have been working quite well, it created a couple Python scripts that run in Terminal
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