On one end of the spectrum we have rich-text editors. They are intuitive to most users(including me) because the experience there is "what you see is what you get," or WYSIWYG. On the other end, when I write plain texts with Markdown, I can't help but feel...free!
But each of them is an extreme that is not without its own list of costs to audiences from opposite camp.
Rich-text editors
There seems to be a disconnect between us using Markdown syntax to format texts and when we want to change them, we have to select them and edit with a toolbar.
For example, I'm making this **cat** bold. Okay now I got a bold cat. Nice. Now let's say I don't want my cat to be bold anymore. Well, having experienced that adding asterisks in certain way made it bold, I would have thought that to un-bold it, I could just backtrack by removing the asterisks. But nope, to do so, now I have to learn idiosyncratic UI and rules and keyboard shortcuts, and context-switching them.
Writing purely in Markdown
So I take solace in writing plain texts with Markdown. Everytime I do so though, I wish I never left the WYSIWYG world. Yes we got split-pane. But it's awkward and tiring to constantly track my focus left and right.
Also, Markdown editors I have used tend to perform poorer as my document grows, and the split-pane wouldn't update as smoothly as it did with shorter notes.
What does the intersect of rich-text editors and good old-fashioned plain-text editing look like in one coherant experience?
So this is what I'm exploring with Zuunote: To see how far I am able to go - to sprinkle the goodness of plain-text editing on a WYSIWYG world where it seems right to me, and to do it all in a manner in terms of time-tested, simplicity, small-scale, calm, and slow - and maybe a handful of people will resonate with what comes out of all this.