A thought, triggered by the several "Writers IDE" things I've seen (Manuskript, that other KWriter thing, whatever it's called, even including Obsidian and its ilk): Writers never — indeed almost nobody ever — wants to write using MarkDown. (Or any other markup. This is not a diatribe against Markdown.)
There are reasons we turned away from WordStar in favour of WYSIWYG word editing as soon as we could. Markup is a hack for the early browser world and programmers' editors where the text editing component only works with a single, preset (and usually monospace) font, and HTML is too awkward for ordinary text production.
Sure, it's a good affordance if a writer doesn't have to move their hands from the keyboard to achieve bold, italic or other text modifications, but we know how to do that in WYSIWYG-land... remember Ctrl-B and Ctrl-I? They're still there; you don't need to reach for your mouse to make that shit happen.
I think that what most writers would like is a wording tool that:
- allows us to format paragraphs with some simple styling for stuff like bullet- and numbered-lists, headings and so on, and
- lets us format text spans easily.
In other words, a well-off text editor. Not a rich text editor, not a pisspoor one that requires Markdown (or any other simplified markup), just an editor that's financially comfortable.
Fight me on this!