Today I've added some rudimentary styling syntax to my notebook. It looks like I care about always making the styling very transparent, so it's possible in principle to guess what characters one needs to type to copy the look of something one sees on screen. So the style directives will never be hidden.

The notebook pages in Glamorous Toolkit use a slightly more sophisticated method, which I like: full markup is shown only when the cursor is near it. Elsewhere you only see the rendered markup. No visual clutter, and yet all markup at your fingertips.

The current Obsidian editor does something like that, too. As a user, when writing a long essay, I occasionally find this behaviour disconcerting - the appearance on the screen changes so dramatically that it is disconcerting. I feel "not in control". The older Obsidian editor had two modes (1) writing and (2) reading. That felt clumsy. I guess that I could enable that behaviour with some option, but, I never do. Emacs md-mode shows a hint of the styling, e.g.

_abc_

is displayed with abc italicized but leaving the underscores visible and taking up space that doesn't appear in the final rendering in a browser. Traditional WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages make formatting characters invisible, but, show formatting details in a property box off to the side (where you're not looking) while binding formatting operations to certain keystrokes, e.g. command-I for italic. PlantUML uses two side-by-side Siamese Twin windows - a writing window and a preview window. Our "Slider" app in the Handmade Jam (last year?) did that (two windows), too. A freebie "user-friendly" LaTeX editor (LyX) tries to straddle both views at once - like the new Obsidian editor - but, I find myself not using it. Thus far, as a user, I find all of the above choices evil. I tend to favour WYSIWYG, but, wonder if the two-window approach would be better if the tool made the windows entirely separate instead of being bolted together. I find translucency intriguing (https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1726773202938769), but haven't used a word processing editor that contains it. Currently, I use the lesser of two evils. I switched from using Obsidian (out-of-human-control formatting) to using Pages (WYSIWYG with a property box at the side). My frequency of swearing hasn't decreased, but the target of swearing has moved.