vim-markdown

Vim can't highlight Markdown correctly because it does highlighting via regexps. For correct parsing and thus for correct highlighting of Markdown you need a real parser. See e.g. this: https://github.com/tpope/vim-markdown/issues/4

I use https://github.com/tpope/vim-markdown to write markdown files. And use http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ to 'compile' the markdown file. To check the rendered output I have a key mapping to compile the current markdown file and open the generated html file.

For display purposes, yes. I want better text readability when I'm working on an article. A nice variable-width font, more line spacing, etc. I want my Vim buffer to look as good and be as comfortable to read as a native text editor like Byword. For formatting, I mostly use Markdown. Ideally, I'd like to see the literal markdown for the paragraph under the cursor, but formatted text for the rest of the buffer. There's actually a script with a pretty good first pass at achieving that kind of Markdown support via Vim's "conceal" feature, but some of Vim's inherent limitations make it imperfect: https://github.com/tpope/vim-markdown/pull/9 I'm hoping that the way neovim decouples the UI layer from the underlying editing engine will make it easier to address issues of that nature.