Read the document, not the syntax

Open a Markdown file in most text editors and you get a page full of hash marks, asterisks, and square brackets with the writing wedged between them. A heading isn't a heading. It's ## A heading. A link is a smear of brackets and parentheses you read around to find the words.

You learn to read past it. But "read past it" is the tell. You're reading the source code of a document instead of the document.

The common fix is a preview pane. You write on the left, the rendered version shows on the right, and you glance back and forth. It turns half your screen into a mirror and leaves you to reconcile the two halves yourself. A format that was meant to be readable in plain text now needs a second copy of itself before you can read it.

Unmarked takes the other path. Open a file and you see the finished document. Headings look like headings. A link is the word you click. What you are looking at is what you wrote.

When you want to edit, the syntax comes to you. In Write mode the marks appear on the line your cursor is on, exactly where you are working, and the rest of the page stays a clean document. Move to another paragraph and its markup settles back. You see the structure when you are touching it, and only then. Reading and writing are the same calm page, not two halves of a screen fighting each other.

Markdown was readable in plain text from the start. That was the whole point. Somewhere it became normal to stare at the raw marks anyway, because the tools were built as editors and never as readers. Unmarked is built as both.

Open a document, and you see a document.