zet

Second Thoughts About Markdown Angle Brackets

It’s a small thing, but for a guy who copies from the terminal as much as I do having those pesky angle brackets around links is really fucking annoying. I’m always grabbing them on accident. So my question is, why? Why have them at all around links? Why not just encourage sane URLs and allow the schema to be the way they are identified? I mean, that is what GitHub Flavored Markdown added. If the context is in a paragraph why else would you ever right them? And, by the way, why can’t we infer URLs from their suffixes? A lot of systems do, we humans do, why not allow that? Isn’t it more “human”? I certainly think so.

So, today is the last day you see me putting angle brackets around any URLs. It’s just not needed. This goes for my zettelkasten and everything else. So what if it’s not CommonMark specification. So it won’t automatically highlight in CommonMark. Who gives a shit. Most terminals are smart enough to see the URL and do the detection on their own, even MS Terminal gets this right. So be gone, you angle bracket monstrosities from a bygone era! Your time is over.