To me, one of the big features of markdown is it's half WYSIWYG.

By that I mean, the basics reuse the way we faked formatting to do real formatting. The input is (usually) perfectly readable on its own.

Even if you don't know (or remember) how to author a markdown file, you can probably still read it just fine. The tables still look like tables. The paragraphs are just paragraphs.

I do still have to look up how to do stuff in markdown sometimes. And that's fine. Your active vocabulary is always smaller than your passive one.

So the way I judge this is by how readable the input is.

I'm not sure how well they succeeded at that. A lot of what they show doesn't really add to or take away from that.

But I didn't see any examples of them formatting math. I only rarely use LaTex. And when I do, it's not because I need a "paged" mode or need to include an author. It's because I need to format something markdown can't do, and that's usually a math equation.

So I am curious how that ends up looking.

That's a good argument. However, Quarkdown is still a strict upgrade over typing latex directly or whatever, and you get more predictable results and better compatibility with LLM-assisted editing than with a GUI editor like Word.

Going to work on a Quarkdown with even more Superpowers and a seamless UI/UX so you don't need to remember all the odd new commands.

I shall call it Microsoft Word.

As I'm writing a small markdown renderer, I find it difficult to even find a name for it, let alone get people to use it once it's ready. So I guess the ol' Markdown is too standard for a "plain markdown" editor to stand out today. Only tools that are polished and dare-I-say full of features beyond normal markdown can stand out from normal Markdown editors to make it into the front page of HN. Sort of natural selection I guess.

FWIW, Obsidian.md makes a fantastic WYSIWYG editor for basic markdown.