markdown on jwogrady

Four editor defaults that are right for code and wrong for prose

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:33:00 -0500

Zed’s defaults are tuned for code, which is the right call and leaves four of them wrong for what I’m actually doing in here.

Autosave, for reasons recorded an entry ago and not worth reliving.

Soft wrap to editor_width — markdown has no line length, and a horizontal scrollbar inside a paragraph is a problem I inflicted on myself.

The third one is the one I’d never have guessed. Turn trailing-whitespace stripping off for markdown. Two trailing spaces is a hard line break; strip them on save and the editor silently rewrites your text, and the diff shows nothing wrong because whitespace is invisible. A formatter that is correct for every other filetype quietly corrupts this one.

The whole embed reconstructs from one string in the URL

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:31:00 -0500

Hugo ships shortcodes for YouTube, Vimeo, X, Instagram and gists. Not Spotify. So an embed is either raw HTML or something I write.

I spent a while trying to move a copied iframe around before noticing that the entire thing reconstructs from one string:

open.spotify.com/album/6mnGRO87UFiKOoHL3BezZ7?si=abc123
                 ^type ^------- the id -------^ ^tracking

That ?si= is share-tracking. It isn’t part of the address and it doesn’t belong in a published page.

Everything else — the width, the allow list, the frame border — is boilerplate I can generate. So:

Raw HTML disappears from markdown without saying anything

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:24:00 -0500

Put an iframe in a markdown file and it renders as nothing. Not a broken element, not a comment, not a warning in the build log. The element simply isn’t in the HTML, as though I’d never typed it.

Goldmark — Hugo’s markdown renderer — discards raw HTML unless you tell it otherwise:

[markup.goldmark.renderer]
  unsafe = true

I’ll defend the name. It’s site-wide and it re-enables all raw HTML in all markdown, which is a sensible thing to refuse when content might come from someone else, and a sensible thing to allow on a personal site where I wrote every file.