Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Cover image for Feature update: Markdown toolbar
Amy Lin for Forem Core Team

Posted on

Feature update: Markdown toolbar

Hello, Forem Creators!

We have an exciting update for you. We believe it will also delight your wonderful community members.

We now have a markdown toolbar in our editor!

We have always prided ourselves on our minimalistic and concise design. When possible, we keep things simple and straightforward. Our editor is tricky, though. While we have gotten consistent feedback that our community appreciates the simplicity, we have also gotten requests for more instruction and guidance when writing, especially around markdown formatting syntaxes. We certainly don’t want those who are not familiar with markdown syntaxes feeling uncomfortable and unwelcome to share their experience.

To improve this, we are adding a little human touch to the editor with the introduction of the markdown toolbar. We believe the toolbar should give writers just enough guidance to have an enriched writing experience without formatting get in the way of the writing itself. In other words, we aim to remove the distractions you may encounter, so you can focus on writing. (Hint: we also have something exciting planned around simplifying liquid tags ✨)

Have you checked out the Toolbar yet?

If you haven’t, I encourage you to do so. It’s right in the editor where you create a post. If it appeals to you, I would also encourage you to introduce it to your community! We believe this will lower the barrier for them to start writing and have meaningful conversations.

Cover image screenshot by Suzanne Aitchison.

Top comments (16)

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ildi profile image
Ildi • Edited

A very welcome feature update, thank you Forem Team! It's awesome that the new toolbar is also available on mobile.

What are your thoughts about also bringing the markdown toolbar to the comment form?

Another thought I had when testing: once liquid tags have been unified, it would be useful to integrate embeds in the markdown toolbar as well. I believe this would make a big difference, as right now I find myself clicking the Liquid Tags link in the Editor Basics to copy the liquid tag syntax im trying to use. The toolbar option would be a quicker experience compared to manually typing them out. Admitingly it's also a bad habit that I have now formed and should learn to break.

I noticed that the new toolbar includes a link to the editor guide. I think this should open to a new page. Right now if you click it opens on the same page, and if you go back, you get a blank gray page (this is prob a bug). You have to refresh again in order to realize that you have not lost the written content in the editor.

Forem toolbar screenshot

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

Hi Ildi - thanks for the great feedback!

What are your thoughts about also bringing the markdown toolbar to the comment form?

Great question! Yes, we do plan to bring the toolbar to the comment area after we polish the toolbar in the editor for a while first.

it would be useful to integrate embeds in the markdown toolbar as well.

This is actually also part of the plan. πŸ˜‰

I noticed that the new toolbar includes a link to the editor guide. I think this should open to a new page.

Thanks for reporting this! This is an oversight from our side and will be fixed shortly ;-)

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ildi profile image
Ildi

Awesome stuff, looking forward to these updates πŸ₯³

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varhal profile image
Varhal • Edited

Hey! I think the easiest way to use liquid tags is to replace them with something like this github.com/discourse/onebox.

How it works:
The user simply inserts a link to twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. into a post or comment. and this link automatically turns into a liquid tag.

Like that:

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

Hey Varhal - thanks for the reference.

What you have brought up has also been discussed internally! While this is an easy, intuitive way to add embeds, we do think we still want to respect the author's decision on whether they want to add a link or turn it into an embed. So unless anything changed or some other good reasons suggest against it, I think we are going into this direction :-)

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varhal profile image
Varhal

Hey, @amyatforem !

If the author does not want to convert the link into a block, there are two ways:

  1. Asking the user if he wants to turn into a block

  2. Convert into a block and give the opportunity to cancel, add a cross

Example from notion.so

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amyatforem profile image
Amy Lin

I think we are in sync, @varhal πŸ˜‚

This is exactly one of the options we have discussed, in terms of how to realize the vision - essentially turn links into embeds automatically, but provide a quick way to revert it back to a link effortlessly. So yes - we would definitely consider that! Thank you for your wonderful feedback.

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lee profile image
Lee

I think upload image is missing from mobile, will double check again

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ildi profile image
Ildi

It’s there but you have to swipe left on the toolbar to see it.

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saritchaethudis profile image
Sarit Chaet Hudis

Thanks for the update!!
I'm a new contributor to dev.to and had to say, it took me a LOT of time to figure out how to use syntax highlighting..
About half an hour of searches brought me to this super-simple solution of writing the language name after the three tics (dev.to/jmhungdev/javascript-syntax...)

I suggest adding it somewhere to the writing guide, in case others find this confusing :)
sarit

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lee profile image
Lee

Yay!!!!!!!!!! Great news :D

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rayan profile image
Rayan Nait Mazi • Edited

Woooow this is amazing !
Great feature, thank you :)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

This is such an awesome update. πŸ˜€

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ce7in profile image
Muhammed Cetin

Thanks a lot dear Forem Team for this update. Amazing timing :)

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oli profile image
Oli

Fantastic news! Well done πŸ‘