Add "Write" and "Preview" tabs over comments, for easier editing of Markdown

[poperigby]

It would be similar to how GitHub does it, and it would make it easier to see how your comment's markdown would render.

[thomask-gh]

Or maybe use a simple and small WYSIWYG markdown editor? (like pell?)

[poperigby]

I think Markdown is more accessible and easier to work with than WYSIWYG because it's so simple. Riot gave a good explanation of it in this article: https://blog.riot.im/riot-web-1-5/

[thomask-gh]

Well, why not, might indeed be simpler. I'm OK with Riot's solution (the one mentioned in your article) because of this: (emphasis is mine)

The most noticable change is that we’ve dropped WYSIWYG formatting in favour of markdown. Users who might not be familiar with markdown formatting will be nudged in the right direction through contextual formatting options that appear when you select text:

Indeed, the vast majority of normal people who just watch videos on the internet never ever heard of Markdown, so having buttons to style their comments will help them, even if these buttons just insert the necessary ** or __ or whatever else, just like they do here in GitHub. And in this case it would indeed be useful to have a "preview" option like you suggest.

So what I'm suggesting here might in fact be another feature, complementary to the one you suggest: have buttons to help people who don't know Markdown yet style their comments with it. And just like on GitHub, there might be a small icon or mark that indicates that "Styling with Makrdown is supported" with a link to a small guide on Markdown syntax. 🙂

(PS: I'm not technical enough to know, but maybe it would be easier to just use a small library like pell or another one than it would be to implement all this buttons + preview tab + help link stuff, I don't know)