[adrusi]

At least in English, typographic conventions have historically equated underlining with italics, and the reason the underscore key is present on your keyboard is because it was used on typewriters to format text that would have been italicized in printed text.

Surrounding text with underscores to indicate italicization is intuitive to anyone who is familiar with that convention.

Personally, I find surrounding text with forward slashes exactly wrong for italicization, because I mentally apply a skew-transform to the text to make the slashes into vertical lines, which leaves the text itself slanted in the wrong direction. Backslashes would make more sense, and also avoid looking like regular expressions. But literally no one uses that convention and we do not need a new one.

[eviks]

I've described what intuition is, you haven't addressed it, familiarity with convention is not intuition, it's just knowledge. And given that convention is unintuitive (_ for underlining would be, and on typewriters underscores were also used to, you know, underscore text), that's a bad convention

Also, this /convention/ already exists and used, despite its low popularity (eg orgmode or Bear note app), so you're also literally wrong here

[mst]

He said the convention that doesn't exist was -backslashes-.

Also, intuition is "understanding without conscious reasoning," so remembering a convention IMO counts.

Consider e.g. parental intuition of noticing subconsciously it's too quiet and immediately going to find out what the kids have done.

For UI, consider the floppy disk icon often used for 'save' - it's considered intuitive because the vast majority of users already recognise it without having to think about it, even if they've never had a system with a 3.5" drive themselves.