How to make links in composer show as blue+underlined

Support
1

I’m asking as a user being frustrated that Markdown links in the composer steal too much precious composer real estate on mobile. Some long URLs can span several lines, so I was wondering if there is a setting or plugin to ensure links are shown only as the link text in blue and underlined.

Thanks.

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3

To prevent a long link:

  1. Just link a word or phrase:
  • Select text, hit chain icon in composer, complete the form OR
  • DONT select text, hit chain icon in composer and fill in the form
  1. But usually a link will onebox unless the target is somehow a badly run website or blocks the onebox crawler from your site. You can prevent a big inbox by adding some additional characters to the same line, then you will just get linked words.

The exact formatting of the link depends on your theme.

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Hi Robert
Thanks for replying. Following your suggestions does not fix the problem. The links are still taking up way to much space in the tiny composer on mobile devices. I want the url not to be visible in the composer.

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5

Ah sorry, I misunderstood. The links are raw in any Composer. It’s markdown. It is not a WYSIWYG editor. There is no simple solution.

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If it’s an internal url for example a topic link then you can use the following format to make it shorter: /t/-/topic-id. This way you can skip the domain and topic title. And only use the topic id which is a number to find the topic.

Or there is a theme component too for it: Share Link Shortener

—-

If it’s an external url then I think it only possible with a kind of url shortener right now. It would be cool to build a theme component or plugin which automatically shorten the url. It could be control by a setting to restrict the internal urls or what domain setted up. But this is just an idea :sweat_smile:

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Thanks a bunch. I tried the relative url method but failed as Discourse wrongfully added http:// in front. But I will try again. It would be great if the post number was enough for internal links.

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Yeah, that’s possible:
For example:
This topic OP:
[OP](/t/339458)
OP

This topic third reply:
[Third repy](/t/339458/3)
Third reply

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