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Document a new plugin for shorter thematic breaks #376

@csala

Description

@csala

Context

I am using mdformat but having troubles with the current thematic break rendering composed of 70 underscore characters, which I am rather used to typing as three dashes ---.

My (very personal and opinionated) reasons being:

  1. The default vim highlighting for Markdown syntax breaks when multiple underscores are put together, because it conflicts with the italics format. Notice that this can probably be solved with Vim plugins or configuration tweaks, but the origin of the problem is about raw vim with no plugins.
  2. Typing --- while writing a document is quick and easy, while typing a line of exactly 70 underscores is comparatively much harder and needs some sort of copy/paste action. My usual coding workflow involves code style checkers like mdformat and black as pre-commit hooks, but in general I try to type in code and documentation that is already valid to minimize the number of times that these tools have to modify what I have typed, which forces me to redo the review, git add and pre-commit loop.

I admit that these are very personal reasons, so I do not wish to engange in any discussions about the current rendering style and the rationale behind it.

Instead, I thought best to take the route of coding a new plugin which overrides the rendering style for thematic breaks with three dashes, so anyone who wants can take advantage of it without having to do any change in the main mdformat project: https://github.com/csala/mdformat-simple-breaks

Proposal

The proposal is just to add the plugin to the corresponding list in the documentation
I'm happy to make a PR for it.

Tasks and updates

  • Discuss and decide if a PR is wanted
  • Do the corresponding PR

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