Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally

Due to "popular demand", PerlMonks now supports Markdown formatting for writeups. Note: Initially, Markdown is only supported for comments (aka notes). If everyone likes it, we will extend the capability to root-level posts as well (SOPW posts, etc.)

Some relevant past discussions:

Sorry it took me a minute to implement this feature. :-D

To enable the use of Markdown in your comments, go to your User Settings and change the "Format writeups as:" selection from 'conventional' to 'markdown'.

Be aware that this is a global setting. You can't select the format at the time you submit the writeup.

When you are looking at a writeup entry box (textarea), you will see a short note immediately above it indicating which markup you can use.

This change was actually relatively simple to implement, since modules for converting markdown to HTML already existed.
I would like to know if there is any demand for any other Lightweight markup languages.
For example, we could add support for Textile or some flavor of wiki text.

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon staffed with 16,000 zombies.

Comment on Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally

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Re: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by Co-Rion (Monk) on Jun 09, 2021 at 21:08 UTC
I've reverted these patches, as they broke posting for all users that had the "preview" button enabled. Unfortunately, I don't know why/where the breakage occurs, since the patches look fairly simple. I hope that we can re-enable the feature soon.	[reply]
Re: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by LanX (Sage) on Jun 09, 2021 at 21:18 UTC
For an alternative, here a shameless plug: Wikisyntax for the Monastery I'm using it for 7 years now (?) and published it in 2016. choroba, Discipulus, FreeBeerReekingMonk pryrt GotToBTru and others are regular users. Several thousand posts were written in the meantime, only minor issues. I wrote more than 50% of my posts from mobiles since I'm using this, HTML tags are a PITA otherwise. "Wikisyntax" is probably misleading because it primarily supports autolinking of URLs de-localizing internal links (no lockouts) `https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=11133704` becomes Re: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally short doc-links like `?my?` for `my` automatic `<p>` tags between paragraphs short inline code-tags via `'single quotes'` email-style quoting with > text... automated linking of `Module::Names` -> Module::Names Plus: It doesn't interfere with the internal syntax: The new syntax is translated to uppercase tags like `<P>` before posting and those uppercase tags are translated back again to the new syntax when editing , i.e. the `<P>` disappears at paragraphs end. (click on the xml display-link to see the stored format with uppercase tags) It's based on a multi-phase regex logic and can be easily ported to Perl. Hope this was of interest! :) Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by cavac (Priest) on Jun 10, 2021 at 07:48 UTC
This is just my personal view of things: If i want to format things, i find it much easier to use proper HTML than Wiki-style syntax. I'd rather prefer a WYSIWYG javascript thingy on top of the HTML textarea, complete with a "edit source directly" feature. On my own blog i use ye olde CKEditor 4 (the V5 rewrite is BS and in my world view does not exist). Of course, i've been living and breathing HTML since the early days of GeoCities(), so when i see HTML it's basically equivalent to formatted text in my eyes 8-) () Yes, yes, i can see Indy pointing at me and shouting "he belongs in a museum".... `perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by jdporter (Chancellor) on Jun 10, 2021 at 13:19 UTC
Are you afraid that you'll be forced to switch to posting in markdown? Because that is not the plan.	[reply]
Re^3: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by cavac (Priest) on Jun 10, 2021 at 14:13 UTC
No, not afraid of that happening. In fact, i'm very thankful for all the people working on improving Perlmonks. I just thought it would be a good idea to mention that some of us... older folks are more familiar with the "classic" way to mark up text on the internet. Whichever route you go, sooner or later one of those new-fangled "graphical" editor thingies on top of one of the syntax parsers would be a nice-to-have. I'm not an expert, but i did implement CKEditor 4 into my blog editor. I would be glad to lend my experience and my hacked codebase to the effort of implementing a "What you see is what you probably get" graphical editor thing. `perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by LanX (Sage) on Jun 10, 2021 at 14:18 UTC
Re^5: Markdown is now supported for comments, experimentally by cavac (Priest) on Jun 10, 2021 at 14:34 UTC
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