This thread is not intended as a feature request. It is more like a conceptual exploration/discussion of a potential feature request. I’d imagine it to have already been requested, but I don’t know how to name it and thus to search for it.
The idea
I would like a viewing mode in which I only see the “preview” – in this mode, I don’t ever see asterisks, hash symbols, and so on (at least, not the ones that are used for formatting).
I could press ctrl+i to italicize selected text, and while in the “hard preview” mode, I would only ever see the italicized text. Same with headings, and all other formatting. I could potentially also use asterisks, hash symbols, underscores, as part of my writing, without worrying about them messing with the formatting. I can blissfully use the asterisk in the conventional way, to signal that an idea will be returned to later in the text; the “hard preview” mode will automatically add to the underlying markdown whatever is necessary to prevent this from creating bold or italics.
The rationale for this suggestion is that it is often unhelpful and unintuitive for the view to jump around between the source view and the “preview”. For example, when I want to edit a heading, I click on it, and then the hash symbols reappear – thus, the text I’m trying to edit is jumping around on the screen. This is distracting. Similarly, if I want to use an asterisk to signpost something, I have to think “okay, how do I negate the bold/italics stuff”. Instead of thinking about my ideas, I’m thinking about formatting.
Stuff I’d like to discuss:
- Whether this idea has already been suggested
- Is the idea is even possible, or if it would take an insane amount of work
- Or, perhaps the idea goes against the ethos of the app, so the devs would not be interested in making it, or Obsidian users just love markdown, so there would be no user support for it
- Whether the idea would best be requested as a plugin, or a core feature request (perhaps a fully-fledged “hard preview” mode is just too complex to be implemented as a community plugin)