but then formatting is awful in markdown, especially with all the template and tag syntax you add there which sometimes take more space than the actual words they mark up, and also due to all the tags you can't search/find/replace across the entire content, how do you find a "__bold__ in a phrase" or "bold in a __phrase__" reliably?
I spend most of my time editing markdown, and this was never an issue.
On the other hand, now I can use any search and editing utility I want, not just whatever my CMS provides. A good example is adding a space after the § character, which I use a lot. It would take five seconds to fix it across the website.
A good text editor theme makes a big difference. I fine-tuned an existing Markdown theme for Sublime Text to better highlight the markup, especially headings.
weird that broken search basics are not an issue, you extol the virtues of site search in your blog, that engine is capable of matching "shcfua" to "Schufa". Markdown, on the other hand, fails in search long before getting to fuzziness
> § character, which I use a lot. It would take five seconds to fix it across the website
True, and then forever to hunt down those few instances where § was used in a quote or something and should not have been fixed
> I fine-tuned an existing Markdown theme for Sublime Text to better highlight the markup, especially headings.
I "highlighted" most of text markup to make it invisible, a bold text is already visualy bold even in Sublime, why woud I need an extra __indicator__? And heading size is also the best highlighter, which plain text editors don't do
But yeah, I wish there were Sublime-level tool for rich text so you wouldn't have to compromize like that...
Search can be anything you want. It's just text. You are free to use the tools that work for you.
I see the diff in Sublime Merge before committing, so I'm far less likely to break something. I used to make so many errors because the WYSIWYG editor caught a random keypress.
Personally, I want those indicators to be there. I'm editing the text and the formatting. I want both to be on the screen.
Frankly I don't need to convince you that this is better. I work with this 40 hours a week and it's better for me. Feel free to take a different approach, but also accept that this approach is tested and true for me.
But it's not "just text", that's the whole point of "markup", and that's also the reason why the diffs would fail outside of simplistic changes. To search properly you'd need to strip that markup, so it can't be anything I want, which text editors offer that???
Also, formatting is there on the screen - in the form of formatting!
The markup is part of the text. Making text bold is a change to the text. It's part of the diff. The text without the markup has no value. I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.
I meant searching for a "bold in a phrase" phrase when it can have various markup in arbitrary places (also, it's not just __, you might have some other valid marker)
But anyway, you can't really use regex here as it's too complicated and error prone for such a frequently needed operation, you need a better mechanism line index or a built in functionality to ignore all markup
look where? it can be any other marker, and it can be nested, and it can be in any position, you can't craft a regex on the fly to capture that, your regex will be longer than the phrase.
