"The visible # isn't a thing Rekindle hasn't hidden yet. It's a thing Rekindle chooses to show."
Not a Gap — a Stance
When someone sees raw # and ** in an editor, the reflex is "it's not finished — it hasn't hidden the markup yet." For a Markdown native, that reads the situation backwards. Showing the markup is a deliberate stance: the characters are meaningful, and hiding them would remove information, not clutter. Rekindle shows markup on purpose, the way a code editor shows syntax on purpose.
What the Visible # Buys You
Markup you can see is markup you can trust. It's identical on disk and on screen, so nothing surprises you at save time. It's greppable — search for ## at the start of a line and you find every H2 written the house way. The spec allows more than that: an ATX heading may be indented up to three spaces or be an empty ##, and the underline-style Setext heading has no hashes at all, so none of those match. That is one reason a house style writes headings in one form, and a one-line search is then enough. It's diff-friendly — a formatting change is a visible character change in version control. And it's portable — the exact same text is valid in the vault, in an essay, on the site, in any other Markdown tool. A hidden-markup model breaks every one of those the moment the rendered form and the stored form diverge.
Visible markup gives you:
disk == screen no surprise at save time
greppable search '^## ' finds every H2 the house style writes
diff-friendly a bold-change is a visible character change
portable same text valid everywhere Markdown isLive Preview: See the Look, Keep the Source
The best part: you don't have to choose between "see the markup" and "see the result." Live Preview renders the effect on inactive lines and reveals the raw markup on the line your cursor is on. So a heading looks like a heading while you read, and the moment you click into it, the # reappears for editing. You get the calm of a rendered document and the precision of source — no writing-mode swap, no export step, no second representation. That's the whole reason source-mode plus decorations beats both raw-source and WYSIWYG for this one user.