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We’ve used AsciiDoc for some of our documentation and for generating slide decks.

It is obviously a nice system but over time our frustration with it grew. Every other piece of software we have uses Markdown: GitHub, work chat, chats of open source projects we work with, things like StackOverflow, HackMD, personal note taking apps, the list goes on and on. Every new person joining our team had to adjust to AsciiDoc just for some of the work they would be doing while staying with Markdown for everything else.

We pulled the plug last year and migrated everything we had to Markdown, and while sometimes I need to use HTML tags to do something advanced I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would.



The frustration for me is then which "flavored" version of markdown you're now using, because the evolution seems to always be "MD is simple and popular" until gets extended with subtle differences. Those subtle semi-random differences in flavors get tiring really fast.


What's the frustration about? Basic things are same everywhere.

If you need complex things, you already have enough skills to figure that out. Also there's almost always a help button around that lists what it supports.


For me the frustration is that you cannot learn markdown once and use it in different places - for non-trivial things you always have to use a reference for a particular flavor.


> over time our frustration with it grew. Every other piece of software we have uses Markdown

Doesn’t seem fair to call that a frustration with AsciiDoc. The frustration is around it, caused by everything else.

> GitHub

Supports and renders AsciiDoc for documentation. But granted, preference is given to markdown in things like comments.


Adoc is too cumbersome and the tooling around it are always subpar; sometimes unusable. It also is trying to be somewhat of a replacement of html and is really bad at it.

Markdown + html or simply Hugo is way better.


Markdown being so ubiquitous is what makes it valuable, IMO. Do you think AsciiDoc has the potential to reach that point as well?




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