@chrillek: A lot of technical arguments that I understand and don’t necessarily disagree with. Maybe my mistake was to describe more what does not work for me instead of what does. But I tried to make clear that I am talking about my use case, and defined what that largely is. In the end, I use all the formats in the poll, and many more; whatever it takes to get a specific job done. I thought that the poll was more about “daily driver” use. The format(s) we use when we have the freedom to choose and want to maximize our personal productivity with the software getting out of our way as much as possible (if I submit a paper to Physical Review Letters, it’s going to be in LaTeX because that’s what it is, but that’s not interesting to the readership here). Using the formats that feel natural to us for our internal use.
For my category of larger, structured, (image/plot) rich, documents, in my personal experience with my kind of documents, Markdown with its extensions, does not work. The ability of inserting html does not change that for me (and I have tinkered a lot with that, but the moment you start using that mechanism, the whole source readability argument for md goes down the drain). For the writing that I do largely for myself, I found Pages and Keynote to be a decent compromise between rich features that can be intuitively harnessed quickly and WYSIWYG, and the ability to search and display these docs in DT and DTTG. Also, they are single file instances, which is essential in the DB environment, where asset management is non-trivial. Having said that, I’m increasingly moving to “computational essay” notebooks in Mathematica (also single file, but unfortunately the QuickLook plugin seems not that good so preview in DT is meagre).
On to my simple notes: Plain text could go a long way. Yet, during my live note taking (either in meetings, or when I brainstorm for myself), I heavily rely on my content (mostly simple headings, nested lists, links - external, not to other notes) looking tidy in real-time (that’s how my brain operates). I can’t be distracted by a edit/preview dichotomy. One example are notes that I take during group meetings, where time is of the essence. Purely empirically, I found after initial skepticism (why do we need another, proprietary, simplistic, note app?) that Apple Notes really works for me, with speed and simplicity, tidy look, excellent sync to iOS, and sharing with family on iCloud. The downsides of Apple Notes are undisputed: A proprietary format, does not allow any integration with DT etc. I would never consider it an archival format. Most of my notes are fleeting, and eventually get archived in DT using the Exporter app (using the md format :-). I figure that a true WYSIWYG md environment (Obsidian?) would replace Apple Notes, but then I don’t want to set up yet another encapsulated note taking universe. Apple Notes is “just there”.
None of that has anything to do with what Markdown was originally aimed at, or whether “options” are a misnomer for “tags” or not.
Addendum: I’ve used Typora in the past as a WYSIWYG md tool. One can operate straight out of DT using that. At the time, I was still hoping to be able to use some imagery in such documents, and there was no good way of accommodating that between DT and Typora. That reinforced my “in DT, one entity of work must be one file” philosophy. It also just displays html additions as source, completely destroying the appearance of the document. So I gave up.
To be fair, I am now using Apple Notes also essentially without embedding images, and use markup that is within the usual offerings of Markdown. Within those bounds, Typora would indeed fulfill my needs for “quick notes” very well, with the advantage of the files being directly in DT and being open-format. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what tool I would use on the iOS side to do similar WYSIWYG. As of now, I believe fast, simple, Mac-iOS interoperability is clinching it for me.
