Simpler markdown editor?

Feature
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Hypothetical and yes I know, potentially volatile subject but my old hobby horse - the markdown editor and non-technical users. I don’t want to go over old ground but this continues to be a bit of a blocker for adoption of Discourse in our mainly over 50 CAMRA forum - it’s not going away :frowning:

I’ve just used the Fasthosts beta community recently and thought to myself “this is a nice little editor, simple and effective”. I noticed a little menu box bottom left which opens up the usual limited editing options like bold, italic etc.

https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/community

But there is an advanced button on there which to my surprise reveals that this community is based upon markdown. I can’t comment how effective switching between the two is but would it be feasible for something similar in Discourse?

I see this as a win-win situation. The markdown detractors are happy as they have a nice simple editor for 99% of the time and the technical camp are happy because it’s still markdown under the hood.

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Could you share some screenshots (better yet, screengrabs) of the editor UX you’re talking about? Not many people are gonna bother signing up to that website just to have a look at some buttons :wink:

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Sure - this is new comment box when you open up an existing topic:

image.png835×449 18 KB

I entered the bold text using the Ctrl-B keyboard shortcut. Clicking the only visible menu icon slides in a limited text editing toolbar:

And advanced mode switches to markdown:

image.png691×271 10.5 KB

Editing help opens another page describing markdown:

https://help.fasthosts.co.uk/app/community/utils/editing_help

Not sure that link will work so here’s a PDF print of the page:

Advanced Editing Help.pdf (84.6 KB)

I entered some text that gets interpreted as markdown and it prefixed it correctly. For example, people often put #1 at the start of a line which turns it into a header. In this editor, #1 worked as expected and when I switched to advanced/markdown it had been prefixed as \#1

I asked on the community if the moderators knew which system it was and they said Oracle. Zero knowledge of Oracle these days but maybe it’s Lithium?

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Interesting enough, I had the same request in my newly transferred community just the other day - mainly because our old solution had an rich text editor.

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I completely agree with @Rob_Nicholson I think this compromise with a simpler viewer but markdown under the hood is a great solution.
This looks like a very interesting solution… @sam @codinghorror @erlend_sh @XieLong
Anyone did any further work on this? Any plugins / extensions available. Can more people bump this discussion up ? Or are there any alternate discussions that I can’t find…
This help in a huge jump in adoption…

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lol I just saw this for the first time. Its exactly what I made:

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Thanks! Checking this out!!

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