Editor: Markdown toggle

[RhettTrickett]

Raised by @Minenash

These posts are in markdown, but we don’t get a markdown editor mode. As someone who writes in markdown all the time, I personally find it easier to edit that way then to use a button bar.

@drenther - Let's discuss the feasibility of this.

[drenther]

We have had this in mind from the very beginning of designing the new editor's architecture.

We already support all the markdown shortcuts in the rich text editor we have. It's like getting the markdown editing experience with the visuals of rich text editing. I am a little unclear as to what added benefit a raw markdown editor will provide.

[anson-vandoren]

We already support all the markdown shortcuts in the rich text editor we have

I may be missing something here, but the editor I'm using to create posts definitely doesn't support all or even most markdown.

The immediate benefit for me is that my posts are all originally written in markdown for my personal blog, and when cross-posting here it takes quite a bit of time to paste the markdown into the Able editor and then reformat everything.

Some examples:

• Pasting # ## etc shows the octothorpe instead of converting to a header
• Links need to be reformatted with Cmd-K instead of the [text](link) of Markdown
• Code blocks with ``` don't paste in gracefully, and I need to redo each one

Having actual markdown support in the Able editor would make it much easier for me to post frequently here. The Caret editor does a fantastic job of accepting full markdown while still keeping the rich editor experience, and that's basically what I (and probably @Minenash) was hoping for here as well

[Minenash]

I'm also one of those people who is more comfortable with pure markdown. While I do occasionally use Word/Writer, most of my typing is done on Discord, Slack, GitHub,etc. I even use a markdown editor application. WYSIWYG is awesome for most people, but some people just like the feel of pure markdown.

There also isn't a shortcut for every button. (And this should really be it's own bug report:) Inline code blocks are annoying to work with.

[drenther]

I must say that is some great actionable feedback @anson-vandoren @Minenash

We will try solve the issues in the rich text editor and plan on how to support a pure markdown editor toggle.

We are currently occupied with some features that do no involve the editor. But, we intend to resolve all the issues.

To bring some structure may be we can start by listing all the bugs and missing features in the editor in forms of todos in this or a separate issue and tick them off one by one as we go.

Let me know how that sounds. Thanks again for noting these down.

[RhettTrickett]

@Minenash @anson-vandoren this is now in live beta, thanks to @drenther. You can find the option to toggle Markdown mode in the editors Options menu. Try it out and let us know what you think.

[Minenash]

Sorry for the delay, haven't been on my PC in the last two days.

This is simply great, I only have three suggestions:

1. When in Markdown mode, display Markdown Mode where the style buttons would be.
2. Re-add shortcut support. While this may sound counter-intuitive, it's still useful for the simple bold and italics.
3. Add a shortcut that swaps from markdown to visual editor. This would make the previewing of the markdown quite a bit faster.

And a general suggestion that probably doesn't need it's own issue:
Have a button somewhere to show all the shortcuts at once.

[anson-vandoren]

It looks good to me! Only (small) issue I noticed is that Gist links don't seem to show a preview if they're added in Markdown mode. Not a huge deal; switching to Rich Text and pasting in the link again makes everything show up properly.

Thanks! This is a HUGE time-saver when cross-posting from my personal blog, and also the writing style for new posts is a lot more comfortable to me.

[drenther]

Thanks @anson-vandoren

I will try and fix the issues. Will update here once a fix is deployed.

[drenther]

Thanks @Minenash for the feedback.

This was a really early version that we wanted to get out as fast as we could.

I agree with the inline formatting shortcuts. It helps even in markdown view (just like we have in Github right here).

We will look into the other things you have listed and keep posting updates as and when we make progress.

Thanks again guys 😊

[RhettTrickett]

Happy Friday all! @drenther has fixed the gist previews and added basic support for bold and italic shortcuts in markdown mode. The latter currently only works in Chromium browsers for now. More coming soon.

Any suggestions for the shortcut keys we can use for toggling markdown mode? Preferably ones that won't clash with other browser shortcuts etc.

cc @Minenash @anson-vandoren

[Minenash]

Okay, so I just went through all the keyboard shortcuts of Chrome and Firefox to see which ones are used.

Here's the findings for Ctrl + something layer:

• No conflicts: ~, \, ;, ', ., /, and Insert
• Conflicts, but are probably okay to override:
  • u:
    • Chrome (Win/Linux): Display non-editable HTML source code for the current page
    • Firefox: Page Source
    • Why can we still use it: In editing text, Ctrl + u is usually used for underlining, but since Able doesn't support it, and there is little use for someone to want to see the editor's page source while editing an article, it's pretty safe.
  • o:
    • Chrome/Firefox: Open File
    • Why we can still use it: There isn't much use for opening files in Firefox while writing. And if so, there are other ways. (The next 3 will have the same reason)
  • s: Save Page
  • d: Bookmark Page
  • m
    • Chrome (Mac): Minimize Window (This was does actually have a use)
    • Firefox: Mute Audio

Assuming we only want to do Ctrl + something and not add another layer like Shift or Alt/⌥, then in my opinion we should either do ~ because it's easily one-handable with the Ctrl/⌘ key or we use m for windows/linux because it stand for "mode" and ~ or u because mac already has a use for ⌘ + m.

[RhettTrickett]

Thanks for these Minenash, after discussing internally we've gone with Ctrl + e for now. It doesn't clash with anything and can stand for editor. Using Ctrl + ~ requires an additional keypress on Mac and if you don't use that additional keypress it clashes with the commonly used switch window shortcut which is CMD + `.

Ultimately, I think Ctrl + m would be the best but we just need to make sure this doesn't upset mac users who may use this shortcut to 'minimize' windows. Personally, I don't use it that much and wouldn't mind if it overwrote that. Just not sure about others.

Soumyajit has also added a shortcut for adding hyperlinks in markdown mode using Ctrl + k