I want to use square brackets as normal without having to escape them. Markdown should only treat square bracket text as a link IF it is followed by ().
The issue in the editor (there’s no issue in Reading view) is that single square brackets are in a state of limbo until you do something with them. They could become a [markdown](link.md), a [reference]: link, a [^footnote], and so on.
The CSS assigned to [something] is cm-hmd-barelink, so you could try this for the time being:
Yeah, this is a quirk of Live Preview’s syntax highlighting — it’s highlighting too eagerly. WhiteNoise’s comment doesn’t make sense to me. Fortunately we can work around it with CSS snippets (I use the non-nested one that trainbuffer posted)l