Suggestion to improve something that keeps causing me trouble.
TLDR version:
It’d be nice if the smart-pasting code that creates title + link URL markup would check if it was pasting inside existing URL markup and, if it is, just paste the text instead of making a mess of the existing markup.
Details:
When typing a post, I often make a URL by manually typing everything except the URL which I copy and paste from the browser address bar.
So I might have this:
[Click Here](http://www.example.com)
I then decide “Click Here” isn’t a good enough link title and go find the page’s real title, from something that links to it.
I select and copy that text, then paste it over “Click Here” in my post.
Discourse sees I have a URL + title in the clipboard (something I have no control over, and usually am not aware of, since I selected text and copied text to the clipboard, and pasting into most places would just give me just that text, but the web browser has also included the URL for things that specifically look for it).
Discourse does something which totally makes sense when pasting outside of markup, but creates a mess when inside markup. I end up with this:
[ [The Page's Real Title](http://www.example.com)](http://www.example.com)
At that point (and with much longer URLs than this simplified example) I’m usually so confused by the nested markup that I delete all the markup and start again.
It’d be nice if the smart-pasting code checked if it was pasting inside existing URL markup and just pasted the text, without the URL or any extra markup, in this situation.
(Of course, in a lot of cases I could paste over all the markup and use what Discourse generates for me. But I still can’t get used to that; in my mind, there’s just text in the clipboard, as that’s what gets pasted everywhere else. And there are times when the URL doesn’t exactly match the one I copied the title from: For example, when linking to a specific post within a thread, or a specific timestamp in a YouTube video.)