On Markdown Editors and Fluff

Rodrigo Ghedin published a short “hot take” on markdown: “[I]f you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting.” I largely agree, although I personally use using KDE’s Ghostwriter, which displays some markdown formatting and has some other nice quality of life features (built-in exporting UI being my favorite) that make me prefer it to pure plain text editor. Mr. Ghedin’s scorching hot take made me think of one recent case where I found Ghostwriter’s HTML preview pane (a step beyond “displays the formatting”) useful. I have recently drafted legal documents that include citations to unpublished U.S. District Court decisions. Below, see what a citation from Lexis looks like for a specific passage in a recent decision of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas:

“Here, Petitioner is not asking the court to review a final removal order, so there is no statutory requirement to exhaust.” Lainez v. Blanche, No. 5:26-CV-00064, 2026 LX 323299, at *6 (S.D. Tex. June 15, 2026).

I trust that markdown fans can see the potential issue here. I format the parties in cases with itallics. But these unpublished decisions are properly cited with an asterisk before the page number. The markdown solution is to escape the page number asterisk. See what that should look like in markdown:

"Here, Petitioner is not asking the court to review a final removal order, so there is no statutory requirement to exhaust." *Lainez v. Blanche*, No. 5:26-CV-00064, 2026 LX 323299, at \*6 (S.D. Tex. June 15, 2026).

Of course, it is easy to miss a backslash, and there is nothing like exporting from markdown to .odt or .docx and finding that you forgot to escape some of the page number asterisks (or, worse yet, used / instead of \, which I definitely did not do a few times recently). Thus, I am all for markdown editors with some nice quality of life features.

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