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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Markdown is the worst kind of formatting except for all the others.

I literally don't know how to write a sentence with more than one asterisk in on HN, and I've been here several years. Formatting is hard but Reddit at least follows a known standard and has a "formatting help" link right under the comment box if you need it.

View on HN

And yet something as basic as a preview is missing. Reddit's community-driven browser plugin ([0]) at least adds that, HN's counterpart [1] sorely needs it.

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Come to think of it, is there a definitive guide to HN comment formatting? Implementing a preview feature in [1] would be doable if the markup is documented.

[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

It's hidden behind the FAQ.

Or you could, you know, gasp, have a visual editor usable by 99% of the world's population, on Reddit.

This is a solved problem. Word solved it back in 1990.

When has there been a visual editor that wasn't awful?

Despite the widespread techie comments against it, I've always found Word to be perfectly usable. I could always do my job with it, with minimal fuss.

Regarding rich text editors for the web, surely there must be one that's ok after all these years.

I don't tend to agree with this, the biggest issue with Markdown is pretty much the double newline, and it only makes sense in places like email where you want single newlines ignored. On Reddit/HN where nobody writes comments with hard newlines unless they mean to change paragraphs, that feature could have been omitted.

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