Hmm I somehow missed this post from all this long ago, sorry about that!
Quick history
The biggest reason why weâve ended up this way, with a partial support for Markdown and also definitely non-standard, is that Dynalist doesnât advertise itself as a pure markdown editor.
First, we have users who use formatting infrequently, and donât expect to be writing in a syntax like markdown, and so to avoid the confusion, weâve initially changed some of our markdown features to have a lower chance of accidentally clashing with plain text usage of Dynalist. For example, some users might not expect a single asterisk to bold their text, as theyâre probably just doing some math.
The next consideration is that we only wanted partial Markdown support, for inline formatting only. We didnât need any of the paragraph formatting, making lists, etc, because it would be unnatural to use those instead of Dynalistâs bullet structure.
But in the end, we ended up with a weird format (that also grew to accommodate our other features like latex, date, etc). We admit that itâs pretty broken.
####Moving forward
This has been something we wanted to fix, but we want to do it right. This means that itâs going to be a lot of work coming up with a format that works with everything Dynalist can currently do, which can be easily converted from the current format, and it also has to support WYSIWYG which is expected from many non-advanced users.
Much of the work in that regard comes from rewriting the entire document editor to work with a WYSIWYG editor, how to render it properly, working with selections and history (for example, when you undo or redo, properly setting the cursor or selection box), supporting a variety of ways a user can copy from and paste to other editors, exporting, etc. Thatâs not to mention the amount of work we need to put in for migrating from the current format, making sure you donât end up with a half, or wrongly converted document, making sure collaboration doesnât screw up the conversion, making sure that users who use our offline-enabled apps donât sync the old format into an already converted document, etc.
So⌠weâve been waiting for a good timing to fix this. In the meantime, we are collecting the pieces necessary to make the hard decisions, such as what people need to get their work done, what people expect the system can and should do, etc.