alt Hacker Newshttps://djot.net/ seems to be very sane and still very similar to markdown. And after reading the CommonMark spec, I appreciate the saneness very much. CommonMark did a great job at describing all the rules and edge cases, but it clearly shows how messy markdown is.
What do you all think of Djot?
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Djot is great so far, and I'm eager to switch to it from Pandoc Markdown since editor support for Pandoc Markdown is lacking.
Looking at the repo's issues, I'm a bit concerned that it's already fragmented since some enthusiasts have implemented features far beyond, or against, Djot's spec. People seem impatient for v1.0...
too little (preserves weird whitespace semantics requiring extra newlines, non-obvious _under_ for /italics/ markers, confusing multitude of link syntax, too many and too few list markers (why isn't • allowed?) too late? But would've been a great start instead of the aborted markdown attempt back then...
it's amazing
I like most of Djot’s simplifications, but its requirement to write nested lists with blank lines between every change in indentation is a dealbreaker for me:
Yes, supporting indented list items without blank lines in between would make Djot’s parser more complicated. But I write nested lists all the time in my notes, and extra blank lines would distract from the content. For me, it’s not worth it to make my raw text ugly just to make the file easier to parse.Djot could have avoided the blank line requirement by not trying to join hard-wrapped lines back into one paragraph / list item. That would work for me because I only soft wrap my text. Djot’s choice to support hard wrapping caused all of its users (including those who hard wrap) to have worse nested list syntax.