I submit a lot of posts from mobile, and I find some of the markdown tedious to enter on a mobile keyboard. I know JavaScript is supposed to be a last resort, but I'd really like to have some assistance in the post authoring and comments fields.

I assume this could be a user script. Looking at the wiki, it looks like none of the current ones do this.

Thoughts on this? Things people are already using? Ideas for existing tools to build on? Would it be better as a user script or as a feature of the main site, perhaps with an option to disable it? I'm medium at JavaScript but would happily take a crack at it.

Here is my inital feature list:

• link button - select text, press the link button, get a prompt for the URL, replace the selected text with the markdown formatted text and URL.
• quote block- select multiple paragraphs and click the button to block quote them all
• bold, italic, strike though buttons - apply the markdown to selected text
• spoiler - insert a details block at the cursor. If text is selected wrap it in a details block and prompt for the summary.

if I were to develop it, what else would people like to see on this list?

Many people here have a skill for converting a url from a mishmash of sloppy looking text into something that looks like a clean line but that is clickable and works like a link. Can someone please explain?

At the suggestion of a certain heathen who shall remain unnamed. I'm tossing up a quick and dirty comment (and post text) formatting guide. There is a formatting guide in the docs/wiki with a link just above the comment box, but it can be a bit much to digest.

*italics*
**bold**
~~strikethrough~~
[Text goes here](URL goes here)
<small>small text</small> 
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sup>superscript</sup>
# headline
`code which removes the formatting and makes it look like this block`
* bulleted
* lists
1. and
1. numbered
1. lists

Spoilers is a bit more complicated, the <details> start and end </details> is required, but the <summary> start and end </summary> is not unless you want text in the summary or you want the summary to be blank.

<details>
<summary>Summary text!</summary>

Body text inside spoiler!
</details>

Three underscores (or dashes, but dashes require an extra line) in a row on their own line creates a blank line to divide a topic...
---

You also have a sub-headline text option by putting a single dash under text...
-
...or headline text by putting an equal sign under text.
=

If you like userscripts (who doesn't?) you can install extensions like ViolentMonkey that allow you to install little bits of code like the Tildes Formatting Toolbar that can change/improve the sites you use and make formatting here a breeze.

Do use the formatting responsibly, but here are examples for bold, italics, strikethrough, links, small text, sub_script, super^script,

headline text,

sub-headline text,

code,

• bulleted
• lists,

1. and
2. numbered
3. lists

Most formatting can be combined as well such as superscripts, lines, and small text to make...

...sentences with a...¹

¹...footnote

I generated markdown with a table of contents which is auto-generated on Emacs. I tested it on https://rentry.co and it works fine. On Tildes the links don't work. Is there a way to make this work? It would be nice to have that for longer posts. Thanks!

I made a new bio recently and here been tweaking it for a while and hit the 2000 character cap and messed with some of the formatting and wording for it to fit in.

Thing is, you don't read markdown formatting. My bio has quite a bit of formatting and the text with the formatting is ~1960 characters, but the text you read is only ~885 characters (according to word counter), or less than half that. I feel like that's not how it should work.

To simplify the title:

(Formatted text, no space. (Behind the arrows.) While it's expected for quote blocks to not separate with one 'line' between them, it's definitely not expected for the block to be the same size, even w/o text.)

(Formatted text, with a space. Added this one in to contrast with Preformatted w/ space and because it separates the code blocks.)

>
>
>

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, no space. The "quote trigger" arrow in the middle is the bug, since if you look at the "view markdown" option of this post you'll realize that arrow shouldn't be there.)

 >

 >

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, with a space. This is how I personally fix the bug, if it is that. You can also fix it by typing space into the phantom arrow.)

Now with text inside the quote blocks, for comparison. (And because quoteblocks have to quote something.):

qwerty

asdf

(Formatted text, no space. Here the block expands normally for the text.)

qwerty

asdf

(Formatted text, with a space.)

>qwerty
>
>asdf

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, no space. The arrow in the middle I never typed in is still there.)

 >qwerty

 >asdf

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, with a space.)

I'm complaining mainly because <these> 2 keys tend to be in the symbols tab on a mobile keyboard and are really annoying to keep going back from and to while making something like a <details> box.

Some replacements I imagine (0 programming knowledge) could be:

>small text here< ( for > to not make quotations at the beginning you could maybe put some unrelated character like ) or ] before it)

^superscripted text here/ (or you could just use parentheses to delineate which text is formatted like on reddit and probably all normal places)

_subscripted text here_ (admittedly I know this messes with underscore being equal to asterisks in formatting, but I don't know which key you could use avoid this that still is intuitive)

{Details
[Summary text here]

Details text here}

Replace the <details> prompt with { and </details> with } and presumably everything should work, right? (The brackets can have the summary functionality limited to within the details box because they're encased within the curly brackets? Admittedly I don't really know.)

I'm new to Tildes, but I've been using Markdown-based comment systems
for more than a decade: both Reddit and GitHub. My programming blog has
been written in Markdown for the past 8 years. Overall I've probably
written several novels worth of content in Markdown in my life.

I've already noticed that Tildes has made a serious mistake in its
handling of line endings: All line endings are treated as hard line
breaks. This diverges from CommonMark and most uses of Markdown in
practice. If I wanted a hard line break, I'd put two spaces at the end
of the line, as specified by both CommonMark and the original Markdown.
Line endings should be otherwise be soft.

GitHub made the same mistake with its "GitHub-flavored Markdown," though
fortunately this mistake has been limited to issues. GitHub README.md
files don't have this behavior, nor does GitHub Pages. It the only other
Markdown system I've used with this flaw.

Why does this matter? If I'm writing more than a single sentence, I
never edit my comment inside my web browser. I edit it using my text
editor of choice, Vim, since it's far more comfortable. I don't even
have to copy-paste the text between applications. Instead, I have an
add-on, Tridactyl, that does this seemlessly and effortlessly.

Hard line endings just don't work well with long prose — exactly the
type of content that Tildes is encouraging — particularly when edited in
a proper text editor that knows about paragraphs and can do its own line
wrapping. Editing long lines is annoying and takes extra care. That's
why we have soft line endings after all.

I'm leaving all my line endings in this post so that you can see the
mess Tildes makes with it, with the ragged right-hand side due to font
differences. If I had written this in nearly any other Markdown system,
the text would have flowed into the page without issues. It is a mistake
for Tildes to do differently. This sort of compatibility issue is
probably going to be annoying enough to keep me off the site.

I have just posted on ~sports the last results of the major European soccer leagues, but it does not show as I'd want to. I read the Formatting help page, but I did not find an aswer to my question, so if someone would like to help I'd appreciate it.

Basically I would like the post to look like this: Imgur link, but in the end it looks like the spaces I put in there do not show as you can see here: Imgur link.

Is there any way to make the post looks like what I want? I read about the Tables section in the Formatting help page, but I do not need a bold header row, which looks like a requirement for a table.

Thanks in advance for the help

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!

Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission.

To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live preview. No settings to configure.

The code is open source and released under MIT. I am not really a JS dev, so any feedback is welcome.

Chrome extension - link

Firefox addon - link

Source code - link

I don't think this is super high priority, but it'd be nice to be able to escape the ~ or @ symbols so that something isn't automatically turned into a link to a group/user. For example, I noticed in a comment I made that ~ers gets automatically turned into a link to the non-existent 'ers' group. I think if I write \~ers then it should not be linked. (E.g. ~ers)

I'm not sure if it's a vanilla reddit feature or if it comes from RES, but I've become reliant upon the preview that shows up under a comment box that renders your response through markdown so you can see the formatting before you post it. This doesn't need to be real-time, since that would likely detract from the "lightweight" technical goal, but I feel like it might be useful