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Comment by ghayes | Hacker News Reader

The issue with Markdown is the syntax is pretty horrible. To create a link, it's [ title ] ( url ), which is incredibly unintuitive. I'm still never sure if italics are or * *. Heck, if I want a single newline, that's not possible. I am all for using a markup syntax; I just wish we had a better option than Markdown specifically.

Additionally, Medium is specifically, heavily concerned with "how it looks" as that is one of the main selling points of the blog software.

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A single newline is possible, and it's the most horrible thing in Markdown:

   When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown,
   you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p

Agreed. It's an appalling kludge, and I bet most of these ``distraction-free writing environments'' (vomit) don't highlight the extra trailing spaces in any way.

I have the following in my .vimrc which at least makes them visible:

  set listchars=tab:»\ ,eol:¬,trail:·

Of course, having them visible doesn't change the fact that they're an appalling kludge and I still tend to use <br /> instead.

reStructuredText is another option. It is quite powerful, but the syntax is little complex compared to Markdown.

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

Silly question: shouldn't be piss-simple to write with whatever syntax you like and parse it to markdown, with tools like Python?

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