Square Brackets Intended for Display Not Rendering in Neovim Normal Mode

[rbrinson]

I'm having a problem with render-markdown not rendering square brackets that are just part of the text to be displayed in neovim normal mode. I also have the obsidian neovim plugin, but I turned off its UI rendering to allow render-markdown to handle displaying markdown. If I navigate to the line that the square brackets are on or I enter insert mode, the square brackets are rendered. Otherwise, render-markdown does not display them. The use case is monster stat blocks for a RPG. The RPG uses THAC0 by default but has the option to use ascending AC. The THAC0 score is displayed first followed by the ascending AC in square brackets. Below are screenshots showing the output of render-markdown in neovim. Escaping the square brackets does cause the square brackets to render. However, it also renders the backslash. Is this a bug, or do I need to further configure render-markdown and/or neovim? Thank you for any insights!

System Info:
Up-to-date Arch Linux install
ghostty v1.2.3-arch2
neovim v0.11.5
render-markdown at commit 99bfa5d

Normal Mode

Insert Mode

Escaping Characters

[rbrinson]

I'm starting to think that render-markdown not displaying the square brackets alone as plain text when they've been escaped is a bug. I believe that without the escaping backslash render-markdown is thinking of the contents of the opening and closing square brackets is a link. I say this because I noticed that the text gets a different color. I also tested this same file with markview.nvim. In markview.nvim the square brackets are not displayed, but there is a chain link icon beside the text, and when I escape the square brackets with markview.nvim, the square brackets are properly rendered. I have also tested this with VS Code and Obsidian. Both of these editors properly rendered the square brackets with or without the escaping backslash. I'm going to open an issue for this. I'm not sure if it's a regression or the way render-markdown has always handled square brackets.