What's your thinking on exclamation and question marks immediately after an italicised word ?

I note that you didn't italicise the exclamation mark after packed above. The run on to the exclamation mark looks a little clumsy to me, but the alternative of also italicising the exclamation mark also looks a little weird.

(My own solution is to adopt the French practice of leaving a space before exclamation & question marks. Which I find more appealing anyway, in general use.)

Found the man of culture 🍺

(Warning : Super pedantic response on a completely trivial matter)

Ok, I've just tried it and I don't like it. I don't see how it's a shortcut when it still requires two inputs, the CTRL + i to initiate and then the necessary use of a cursor key to move over the trailing underscore. My way is just two inputs too - two asterisks (I use asterisks, you can also use underscores) that are typed in order, so no funny cursor movement.

And the point of Markdown is that it's intuitive - markdown is meant to look like 'marked up' text. Putting stars around a word clearly indicates some sort of emphasis. That's easy for someone from any culture to grasp. Italics is cursivo in Spanish and 斜体の in Japanese. If they don't know English (and why should they have to?) then it doesn't make any intuitive sense to them for why they're using (and having to remember) the first letter of a word they don't know in a key sequence to emphasise a word. Imagine explaining CTRL + i to a class of Swahili speaking kids, rather than just showing them how to directly put stars (or underscores) around a word for emphasis.

Yeah, that's fair, it's not FOSS. Obsidian has paid services and that's how they make money (i.e. that's what the product is. They don't have your files, they don't know who you are, they don't have your email if used without services and it's not a social network - so you are not really the product in this case). The free version is marketing to get people buy the paid one, but there's no vendor lock in.

Makes sense! Yes it does, though it’s probably not as good as dedicated writing tools, if I had to guess

I usually, listen what others are asking online and IRL. If I am in a chat group, I pay attention to what people are asking, what problems they have, what they are looking for as solutions using Bitcoin in their day to day activity.

So I take notes, I use notepad++ because I can convert it easily into a markdown or even html. Just bulk notes, by category.

Then when I have time and I am bored, I come back to my notes and start testing a scenario based on what those people were asking for help. I try to put myself in their situation, with their level of knowledge, infrastructure, and use profile. I have to see what they see, otherwise the scenario tested is useless and will not find the right audience.

During the testing scenario I improve the original notes with the steps I did, to remember what I did, screenshots or schemes if are needed. I also try to find tricks to make it even easier to use that specific app. Sometimes developers do not explain in the documentation too much about their apps, so we need to squeeze everything from them.

Once the notes are ready and get a form of a guide, I format it a bit, insert some images, to make it more colorful and funny. I notice that if I do not insert some images, people tend to not read that guides or just frugal reading.

Chapters are very important too. Because you can link them into a specific discussion and point to the reader the exact position in the guide.

I like to use the bullets because it looks organized and easy to read, when you are trying to list some features or important points. Bullets are easy to remember.

So in general this is my strategy. The writing is exactly how is coming into my mind, I do not select my words very carefully, I don't care too much. I also have a lot of grammatical errors, I know it very well, but that is my "personal signature", I am human writing, not a stupid shatGPT.