So where did we land here? It is painfully obvious that while this does make tags more prominent it overloads an operator for typing in the editor in a way that I consider confusing and breaks up the user from the flow of editing their post.
This is a problem even when you aren’t adding new headers. Just use arrow to browse through a topic you already edited that has headings anywhere. You arrow down to a # and then when you keep hitting the arrow it starts to select a particular tag or category rather than continuing down the page with your cursor. I now have to hit escape to continue to move down in the post with the keyboard or avoid # landmines.
Heading one oh don’t get your cursor by the pound.
Heading two, if your cursor goes in front of the first # it will give you a menu.
Edit a post with the two examples above and use the arrow to go around and you’ll see exactly what I mean. I agree it makes tags more prominent but if you don’t use tags that is not a feature it is something new in the way of what you used to do.
As far as younger editors. Having their editor do magical things when they are just trying to grok creating headers with markdown language is overloading the user with more things they don’t need to know or understand.
It is fine if the decision is to do nothing here, i’ll look into figuring out a way to just patch it out but given the break up of editing flow and the curve we are adding to new users to have to understand more than what’s in front of them it seems like an option is a good compromise. I’d take at the site level cause likely if you use tags that is more a site decision rather than a per user decision but per user based on site default is probably the way to go.