9
votes
Feature request: Message preview
I'd love to see a preview button, I hate posting without knowing exactly how my post is going to look... I obsess over such things.
I'd love to see a preview button, I hate posting without knowing exactly how my post is going to look... I obsess over such things.
I say don't do that and change the name of the site to the "Wild Wild Westernet"
Who knows what you're gonna get!
Definitely possible, any particular way you think it works well? GitHub has it as kind of a "tab" that you can flip back and forth from the editor to the preview. Some other sites will pop up the preview in a modal.
RES has a live preview underneath the comment/self-text box on reddit. I don't know if it's possible to do on ~ with your security policies and whatnot... but that would be my suggestion if you can do it that way. A tab works too though and actually probably makes more sense from a UI/UX perspective especially for long comments and self-text.
Live preview is possible, but the bad part of it is that it means you have to also maintain a client-side, javascript version of your markdown parser that behaves the same as the server-side one. That's not really something that I want to do, so I probably won't do a live preview.
With an on-request preview (by changing tabs or clicking a button or something), you can just send it to the same server-side parser and display the result.
Could you have a live preview that has an indeterminate loading animation with the text:
Stop typing to see a preview(eg: Example )And after you stop typing for 1-2 seconds post their content to the server to render your preview. This would keep the load on the servers down while maintaining one source of truth for markdown processing.
If live preview is too much of a PITA I would be perfectly content with a tab preview, especially if that's easier for you to implement, more secure and with less performance overhead.
Keep it simple. If/when we/someone writes a RES-equivalent for tildes they can handle the live preview. Until then, a simple, classic 'preview' button is all we'd need - and it's what people are used to, that's how almost all forums have always done it.
I usually submit and then read/edit. :P
Perfectly happy with a tab, then it's available for those who want to see it, but not cluttering up the page for those who don't.
As mentioned, RES has a good model for it.
While we're at it, can we also get a "view source" button like Reddit has? I've found it super helpful for copy/pasting from heavily formatted comments or submissions. Not a high priority request by any means though, as it's just a "nice to have."
That's another RES feature, not a native reddit one, but it's definitely possible. I feel like that should probably be "hidden" somehow though, it's such an unusual need that having a dedicated button for it visible all the time is probably unnecessary.
Ah, didn't even realize it was RES and not Reddit doing that. I agree it may not be as necessary for most people - I am a weird power user with unusual need to copy that sort of thing because I end up writing long heavily formatted comments a lot.
It seems to support plain old Markdown. So there's very little guesswork. This is my very first comment too in Tildes. About "knowing exactly how the post looks", can't it be edited?
Update: Looks like you can edit too. Nice!
Coming back to suggestion on previews, Discourse does it very elegantly IMO.
IIRC we are using the GitHub Flavored Markdown (Commonmark) spec.
And we also support some common html elements as well... e.g.
<a href="https://test.com">test</a>= test