9
A Markdown File Should Just Open
(joshuamorris.info)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
9 points (90.9% liked)
Hacker News
5661 readers
405 users here now
NOTICE: The bot occasionally has downtime, sorry about that. I'm working on adding better monitoring and error recovery so I can get notified faster.
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What? PDFs absolutely don't just work without "extra software", you need a browser or acrobat or some other pdf reader.
I guess it's a call for a OS-bundled markdown renderer but then you have to open different software depending on what you want to do with it which I'd hate personally. Not to mention the 10s of standards for markdown and no way to know which one the file used/intended.
Thing is, if you double click a pdf to open it you’ll see it the way it should look, whereas in the case of markdown files you often get the raw characters. So on most stock systems this point is absolutely valid.
An editor with a function row to apply text styling, bullet points, … solves this problem. Basically the way the default Notes app on iOS (and I’d guess Android as well) already works, but saving as md instead.
Well the functionality they are talking about (I think built in browser support etc) took 20+ years anyways so their point is double bad.