1. Using `classoption: twocolumn`

2. I see that I wasn't completely clear. I meant: why do we want to see our collaborators' changes in real time? To me, that would be very disturbing.

So your 1. is no longer markdown everyone knows, but an ad hoc, badly documented new language understandable by a tiny subset of editors/people. How is that better?

2: it is fundamentally a command line app that converts a .tex file to a pdf (and some other output formats). You can just git over that if you prefer it. The web editor is a separate application, which is very streamlined and a good option for students working together, but sure, feel free to use something else.

Yeah, collaborating in real time on the same document is pretty neat (from using google docs for this.) Having someone else typing on the same page got an unexpectedly visceral "argh! it's moving! get it off of me" reaction the first couple of times I tried it, had to switch tabs and come back later.

It's definitely only a problem for some people, and might even be specific to some aspect of the google docs implementation, I don't know yet. But yeah, that feature is not the slam dunk it sounds like, and you might not realize it until you're in the middle of it.

I'm with you. Git with one sentence per line is generally my preferred workflow for markdown, asciidoc, etc.

It seems that it would have been good to be basically extensions on markdown. For example why use = for headers rather than the established #. + For numbered lists is arguably an improvement on 1. But maybe they could support both. It seems like these are pointless differences.

Their math syntax is already a common Markdown extension but they seem to be more or less compatible in the framing although the actual match language is new which seems fine. Then of course they add on their macros.

So I guess the point is why diverge where not necessary. Not why diverge at all.