Markup by Choice

"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 — you can search for every H2 by searching ##. 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
  diff-friendly      a bold-change is a visible character change
  portable           same text valid everywhere Markdown is

Live 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 mode switch, 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.

Code

Live Preview: rendered when reading, raw when editing·text

Inactive line (reading):   Fire and Ash          <- looks like a heading
Active line   (cursor here): # Fire and Ash        <- raw markup revealed

Inactive line (reading):   the fire catches       <- 'fire' shown bold
Active line   (cursor here): the **fire** catches  <- asterisks revealed

# One model (source), two appearances by cursor position.
# You never leave source; the look just follows your attention.

Exercise

Take a paragraph with a heading, a bold word, and a link, and write it twice: once as Markdown source, once as you'd describe it to a WYSIWYG editor (click here, bold that, insert link). Ask which version you could grep, diff, paste into three other tools, and reconstruct exactly a year from now. That answer is why Rekindle shows the markup.

Hint

Only one version is a portable, self-describing artifact you fully control. The WYSIWYG description depends on a specific app's buttons and internal model; the Markdown source is the same everywhere and forever.