100% agreed. I want for the particular purpose (note taking and somewhat more advanced internal documents) true WYSIWYG.
For other things, I want 100% edit/preview. I have a few hundred scientific publications under my belt, that’s all LaTeX and I would not want to have it any other way. I understand that part of the universe as well.
By the way, speaking of edit/preview: One of the most powerful features in a LaTeX environment is for me the ability to jump in both directions to the corresponding object. Without that, editing a long document becomes truly painful. Question: I have not encountered that feature in Markdown setups. Does it exist? Presumably it must, it’s so obvious. Using for example the DT Markdown edit/preview split pane, many of my documents are significantly longer than 1 full scroll, and if I find something to fix in the preview, it takes me a long time to find the corresponding text in the source. Am I missing something?
(Split into new topic as the conversation was drifting far afield…)
the ability to jump in both directions to the corresponding object
You have to define what the corresponding object is.
You can use the Content > Table of Contents inspector to jump between some elements, e.g., section headers in Markdown, solo emboldened lines in rich text
Good to know that the ToC brings up and highlights that section in both the source and the preview. I did not think about that. That can help, but not really what I am thinking of: In a good LaTeX environment, if you find, for example, a typo in a word (so that’s the fine-grained object I refer to) in the preview, you cmd-left-click on that word, and the editor side will center that section of the text in the editor window and highlight it. So getting to the corresponding object takes the time of a click. And it works the other way round as well. During my first 10 years or so of LaTeX nothing like this existed and fixing typos in a dissertation took time. Then the synctex mechanism appeared, but the feature worked hit and miss. With every new version this got better and now it basically works perfectly, at least in my experience.
The ToC method is useful, but not really at the same level of “instant back and forthness”. Some documents have long sections with many paragraphs (several pages if it were a book), so ToC position can still mean searching over many, many lines. Also the ToC display does not follow where you scroll in the preview. So if I find something to edit in the preview, I first have to figure out in which section I am, then select that in the ToC and then work my way through the edit window within that section.
Recently, Overleaf has become all the rage in collaborative LaTeX editing. In that browser-based editor, the identification is much weaker and a hit-and-miss compared to local TeX environments. That alone makes me avoid Overleaf.
