Maybe I’m being a bit stupid, but is it possible to hide the various markdown within a draft, as I add it.
I’ve noticed, in Bear, that once the markdown is used it’s hidden.
I don’t want to see ### headings, or ** or any other markdown within the notes.
Feel it’s making some of my notes really difficult to read!
I’ve seen Preview, but that’s not what I need.
Is it me? Am I missing something?
I guess Markdown is implemented in Drafts as intended by its creator:
Things does Markdown right. It doesn’t hide the Markdown formatting characters, it just styles them. Effectively, the notes field for tasks in Things is still just plain text. It’s just styled nicely if you write that plain text in Markdown. That’s the right way to do Markdown. Don’t hide the formatting characters; just style/color them.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball: Things Support for Markdown
Whether its “right” or not is certainly a matter of opinion, but, yes, Drafts does not modify your text. It does not hide content, and does not have a live preview mode in the editor.
Related, is there a way to do this in a single draft widget with templates?
There is not. Widgets do now support rendering HTML, I suspect because the CPU/Memory requirements of web rendering controls are way too high to be practical for Apple to allow in widgets without ruining battery life.
Until I started using Obsidian, I was totally fine with the way that Drafts displayed markdown. I thought that graying out of the markdown codes was sufficient.
While Obsidian lacks some of Drafts’ elegance and efficiency while writing, I have come to love the way it “hides” the markdown text for all but the text around the cursor. “Hiding” the markdown is most appreciated with URLs.
I secretly hope that Drafts might adopt Obsidian’s “hiding” style some day.
The only place where I really dislike seeing the markup is with links. Reference links are a good way to hide the clutter but they don’t create active links in the text. If Drafts could ‘activate’ the reference link markup in the body (not the footer) of the text, that’d be a great balance for me.