Last week, I was using Google Docs when I noticed something. I typed #, hit space and watched as my text transformed into a header. Without having to click through a toolbar or use a dedicated keyboard shortcut.
For those unfamiliar, this pattern comes from Markdown: a human-readable alternative to HTML. Its goal is to let people write for the web without breaking their flow so the syntax is deliberately minimalist—asterisks for emphasis, number signs for headers, brackets for links. It makes text readable both in its raw form and when rendered.
This interaction continues a blurring of the line that I've been feeling. A move beyond the world of shortcuts and tooltips where you are both writing and editing at the same time. It makes writing more intuitive. Type - at the beginning of a line and it becomes a bullet. Type 1. and it becomes a numbered list.
It reminds me of ligatures in typography—where letter combinations like "fi" or "fl" flow together into a single glyph, making text more elegant and readable. But this is more powerful: where ligatures merely transform the visual appearance of characters, these text patterns command the application itself. You're not just displaying characters differently; you're using character sequences to reshape the document in real-time.
-mello
P.S.