Another last minute change. Enabling 7 day trail, so you can try rich text features out without having to pay. When trial expires Bike will continue to work, just without features that require a license.
To get preview releases through Bike’s software update select: Bike > Preferences > General > Include “preview” releases.
Bike 1.4 (82) is now the official release!
Thanks for all the help and testing over the last few months. Took a while but I think the end result’s pretty nice. Here’s a blog post with a bit more explantation for the why’s:
Also with some luck might be an interesting discussion on hacker news:
And here’s the Twitter post:
Comment about WordStar and Markdown by codingdave:
(I don’t have an account there so I’m writing here.)
I was using WordStar for CP/M. Since then I’ve been away, but I’ve been observing WordStar for Windows a bit.
For CP/M and MS-DOS:
2 mode:
a. When editing a style and text, shows marks (which are visible symbols).
b. When editing text, hide the mark and indicate “that’s where the style is” in ways that can be shown on the character display, such as underlining or inverting.
For Windows:
2 mode:
a. When editing a style and text, shows marks (which are visible symbols), same as old days.
b. When editing text, hide the mark and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view.
I imagine codingdave is saying that WordStar’s 2-mode for Windows is “necessary and sufficient”, so no new method (like the Bike’s Typing Affinity) is needed.
I myself can say that “Typing Affinity” and “Visible Typing Attributes” are quite good solutions because they can express WordStar’s two modes in one mode without showing the marks inline.
(OK, I’m sorry if it’s all misunderstood… 
)
@dddo Thanks for your comments, good to know. I hadn’t gathered that WordStar was modal in that way. I’ve just been playing with WordTsar … I guess the mode you are talking about is ^P for print controls?
Anyway it’s interesting… seems a lot like Markdown to me, but instead of using character requests for formatting boundaries it uses single character icons. I guess Wordstar approach is more scalable for lots of formatting, but of course doesn’t work in plain text.
In ancase, interesting, but not really a direction I would want to go with Bike.
Awesome Jesse. Thanks for all the amazing work on this.
Wow! WordTsar is interesting and nostalgic 
Additional Information (try using WordTsar now…
“print controls” corresponds to the Markdown mark.
^OD toggle the Display of “print controls” on and off.