As a Typst enjoyer I have to say this isn’t it imo from a quick look at the readme. Typst’s mix of markup and code modes is excellently designed and a high bar for anything to beat, and this looks like it doesn’t come remotely close. (I do have to say, I also heavily dislike Markdown in general)

FWIW, I was hesitant about obsidian for the same reasons. I would've preferred an open source editor and a syntax like asciidoc. But the fact that everything is markdown and it being such a common standard does make obsidian being closed source more palatable[^1]. And tbh, for note-taking/"second brain" purposes, a relatively constrained format like markdown is pretty suitable. I wouldn't want it for technical writing but it serves the purpose for quick and dirty tasks like quickly jotting down notes[^2]. And any other markdown language wouldn't have the same amount of tooling (e.g. org-mode is underspecified and essentially emacs-only unless you see stick to a specific subset of features)

[^1]: see the creator's blog post: "File Over App" [^2]: in an ideal world a more sane/context-free syntax like Djot would have been nice

Have you tried org-mode in emacs? It’s got everything and more! You have zettelkast-style note taking, journal, agenda, spreadsheets and a bunch of other stuff. And everything is saved in text files.

Emacs really is a great operating system!

Did you try Silverbullet? I tried a lot of the stuff you mentioned, but aside from the poor documentation, this hits the sweet spot between power use and carefree for me.

Yes, and it was a renowned job up until the late 90s/early 2000s. The job transformed drastically in the early 80s with upcoming new techniques (e.g. phototypesetting, the predecessor to digital typeset).

Without typesetters, a major role in terms of grammar and design checks broke away. This isn't the only factor, but since early 2000s, typos where everywhere.