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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Markdown renders to html.

Browsers read html. You're supposed to read markdown with a browser by rendering it to html and reading the html.

What a dumb pain in the ass. Do you seriously check out a repo, run the read-me file through a Markdown-to-HTML converter, and then launch a browser to read the result?

GitHub renders Markdown if you click on a file in the Web repo view.

Thanks, but when I check something out, I'm working with it on my computer. I don't want to go back to Github every time I want to read something.

the nicest thing about markdown is that it’s entirely legible in plaintext mode, I don’t need it to be rendered, unlike other markup languages

But since there are vanishingly few readers that render the markup, why have it at all?

Or, from the other angle, with Markdown being found in so many places, why aren't there popular viewers for it?

Many modern editors, including VS Code, have a button which opens a preview pane to see rendered Markdown. It’s a single button click (the page with the magnifying glass on it in the upper right), no one is installing pandoc to read readme files.

The preview is really only needed if there is advanced formatting or HTML in there. A basic markdown doc should be easy to read in plain text.

Thus my point. If everyone's answer is "just read the plain text," then why have the junk in it at all?

And I don't want an extra "preview" pane. That was the specific complaint. Nor do I want these docs in my IDE at all. I want all the available space in my IDE for code.

Again, why have this format all over the place when there are vanishingly few VIEWERS for it? Or vice versa?

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