What’s the story behind having two different ways (using * and ‘_') to italicize something in Markdown? The * seems and looks much better.
@pratik do you mean * or _? The short answer is both were in use on BBS and plain text email systems and common, and that’s where Markdown came from. Using one set is emphasis, two is strong, your choice which you prefer. The goal of Markdown was to basically take what people were already doing in a plaintext context.
@jsonbecker Yes, Mb used it as styling. Fixed the post now. Should've used backticks ☺️ But good to know. Personally, I find * better since as you said, one is emphasis and two is strong. Dunno why Mb supports _ instead of *
@pratik asterisks work on MB for sure. They’re actually more common. I think a few Markdowns don’t support double underscore. But I’ve never found something that doesn’t support asterisk.
@jsonbecker Re: support for asterisks, I meant as options when writing a post on the iOS app which I admittedly use only for replies now. See screenshot below.
@jsonbecker ah. I just type the markdown and never touch the special keyboard stuff. Suffice to say, syntax wise both work. I’m sure it’s just to make it more clear they are distinct than one or two characters of the same thing.
@jsonbecker @pratik Ha! For some reason I landed on only using underscores and never asterisk... I think the app I was using on Windows only supported it that way but I might be wrong since that feels like forever ago.
I'm confident the team would never track it — I assume that would be some seriously creepy method to do so — but it would be interesting to know how many people prefer the different methods.
@pratik I’m in the opposite camp. When I must use Markdown, I prefer _ instead of * for italics because I want a different visual composing cue than for bold.
