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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

But I like to write paths like /usr/bin/ in my text and don’t want to worry about backtick code quoting them every time

This is a real problem considering that some programmers are just sloppy with code-quoting paths and such. And it’s even debatable whether (sort of stylistically) you should even code-quote paths.

There's the same problem with variables and filenames containing 2+ underscores, resulting in unwanted italics.

That at least is rarer than paths.

Most people don't write file paths. Only a concern for programmers, who should be fine escaping them by whatever mechanism.

And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace.

> "And in markdown you chuck them between backticks to indicate they're verbatim text to be rendered in monospace."

Only if the intent is for the URL to be copy/pasted, otherwise you enclose the URL in <url> or [text](url) to make it clickable.

Most markdown implementations make URLs clickable without the angle brackets.

Uh.. what about all those non programmers that write URLs?

Most people don’t write markdown! What’s the demographic of markdown writers who don’t write file paths? Bloggers?

this may be a huge number, because Evernote and a lot of note applications relying on markdown.

> Evernote

Since when?

I apologise, I confused it.

Notion users, Reddit users, etc.

I will say that forward slashes are still more common in regular english text even among non-programmers than underscores. For example, listing options a/b/c.

And you know, URLs.

I don’t really think of Notion as “markdown” but I suppose you’re right since we support a bunch of markdown conventions. Some things are different though like `> ` is a toggle block, and `” ` a quote block. Unfortunately we already abuse / for a command menu, which is by far my least favorite feature. I want to make a setting to disable it but it goes against our anti-settings philosophy.

I think many/most people use slashes more often than they use asterisks, however.

Sure, but a slash before and after a word? I don’t think that’s common outside of file paths.

Not even common including file paths, unless you mean directory paths. Even then, only necessary if you really want to unambiguously indicate a directory in the path itself.

Using slashes for a short/small/abbreviated list is relatively common. For example, the top post on the hiring thread right now is for a "Full-stack/frontend/product engineer". There's another one describing a "M/W/Th" hybrid schedule.

no, but most people definitely use links in their texts and they have the same problem. / is also regularly used for fractions or/and in a situation where you could use two words

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