Why the separate edit/preview modes?

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1

I’m sure this has been covered but I couldn’t really find much about this specific thing.

Why the requirement to use editor/preview modes to properly see your formatting? It’s the biggest thing keeping me from using Obsidian. It makes no sense to my brain and I’m hoping someone could shed some light on it.

I understand that you might want to see the preview version sometimes for certain uses. But if you are using Obsidian as a personal knowledge type system, why not have the option to just show everything in-line? I don’t want to see my text twice next to each other and it makes free flowing note taking clunky. There are extra steps to open notes, extra steps to complete a new note title, extra steps and/or clutter to see images, etc.

My ideal situation would be that I can write with markdown but when I escape that block, it hides the markdown until I click back into that line.

What am I missing? Obviously this makes sense to someone. I just don’t get the appeal at all.

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It seems that there’s been a lot of discussion about this around here.
I, for one, like writing in plain text; it doesn’t distract from the content. (I write my final versions in latex and worry about formatting when I get there.) And for notes, I really don’t care about whether they are pretty or not; the text should be easy to read and write, with minimal fuss, and that’s it. I almost never keep my preview window open, except when I’m just reviewing notes.
There are various CSS themes that emulate some kind of WYSIWYG mode; you could try to experiment with those.

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This has been heavily discussed since pretty much the beginning, and the devs have made it very clear that they’ll be adding a new edit mode. I will welcome it.

In the meantime, I barely touch the preview mode.