Thanks for your response, and my apologies if I wasn’t clear. I don’t write in DEVONthink. When I said I hate doing it, what I was trying to communicate was that I don’t do it. For markdown I’ve almost exclusively been writing in iA Writer.
The issue is that I wish for convenience’s sake that the visual experience of writing directly in DEVONthink was similar to the way the editor in iA Writer looks—because being able to stay in DT all the time would make my working life with multiple text files and documents much simpler (see my other response regarding a “multi-step process”).
For me the problem is that the DT editor is much more difficult to work in visually, for the reasons the OP mentions above. That’s why iA Writer is designed the way it is. Visual simplicity is one of the draws of working in markdown, at least for many writers. Markdown in DT is great in many ways but not in that way.
My concern regarding iA Writer saving back into DT is specifically with DEVONthink To Go on the iPad. On the computer, yes, it seems fine; and to be safe, when finishing in iA Writer on the computer, one can save the document to make sure the most recent changes have been saved back to DT before closing. But I don’t know of a way on the iPad to make iA Writer save manually; I have asked about this elsewhere in the DT community but I haven’t noticed a clear answer. Yes it saves automatically but there is a delay. I’ve had the experience of opening a markdown document from DTTG in iA Writer on the iPad, making edits, and being not sure if/when the edits have been saved into the file within DTTG, and sometimes they haven’t been if I don’t wait a bit with iA Writer sitting open. If someone can enlighten me further about this back and forth specifically on the iPad I’d be grateful.