Markdown Cheat Sheet
A fresh new addition to Journaly is the possibility to use Markdown in the comments. In this very short post, I'll summarize the most useful features of Markdown for writing hopefully better comments.
Please note that the new addition doesn't affect the way you write your posts: it's only available for writing comments. For the technically curious among us (hi Linda), here is a list of links to the related pull requests:
This new feature was mostly single-handedly added by a new code contributor to Journaly. Thanks, Meredith, for this great change!
Okay, I said this will be a short post. Here is the table:
Feature | Syntax example |
headings | # This is a nice heading |
bold text | Markdown is just **great**. |
italic text | Markdown is just *great*. Markdown is just _great_. |
links | [Journaly is great](https://journaly.com/) **[Journaly is great](https://journaly.com/)** for more emphasis Update: Links like http://www.patience-is-a-virtue.org/ are now automatically shown as hyperlinks. |
quotes | > “The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter.” – Mr. Ollivander |
ordered lists | 1. Go to island. 2. Find X on the ground. 3. Dig. |
unordered lists | * Spam * Eggs * Bacon * Sausage |
images (not working) |  |
code | Open a console and type `sudo rm -rf /`. |
horizontal rule | --- in an own line |
strike-through | Write ~horrible~ nice stories, please. Robin's tip: A possible use case for this is to indicate deletions in your comments. |
checkboxes | Absolutely *amazing* what has happened around this post: - [x] correctly styled ordered lists - [x] strikethrough implemented - [x] checkboxes implemented - [x] nicely blue styled hyperlinks - [x] blockquote + line break improvement - [x] lovely styled checkboxes - [ ] do the laundry 🧺 Great work, Robin! 👨🎨 |
Thanks for the post, @Eduard 😄 I hope you like this new feature! I was leaving some feedback on an English post this morning and personally found it really helpful to be able to use bold and italic text to emphasise my corrections, as well as lists to organise multiple points or options more clearly. I think block-quotes could also be helpful, and I'd like to add support for
strike-throughsince this would be a really helpful way of indicating deletions until we build the next big improvement in the commenting experience!Thank you to Meredith for the contribution!
Thank you for commenting!
I'm already loving it 🍟. Yes, I already used boldface meaningfully, i.e. for emphasizing corrections within a bigger (mostly unmodified) sentence.
N̶o̶w̶ ̶I̶'̶m̶ ̶c̶u̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶"̶n̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶r̶o̶v̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶"̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶!̶ (Edit: I just read the mail :D. It sounds wonderful; I'm waiting for that feature since ages).
P.S. Is it intentional that several newlines have no effect anymore? (I think I wrote this also in Linda's 100th post).
Ah, looks like you already figured out strike-through 😆 Maybe you can add that to the guide with the tip I mentioned about possibly using it to indicate deletions 🥳 I'm so glad to see your loving it already! 🍟🥤☀️ I noticed the new line issue as well, I'll take a look into that now while I add the other missing styles!
To be honest, I simply used https://saijogeorge.com/strikethrough-text-generator/ and copied the result 😅🤫. I love Unicode. As far as I'm aware of, strike-through is not part of (vanilla) Markdown. Apparently the GitHub variant has it (https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/14986/strikethrough-with-github-markdown), but obviously
thisorthatsdoes nothing here (yet). Edit: I added a new row to the table.Is Markdown an app? I don't understand how to use "Markdown".
No, Markdown is how you write your comments. The right column of the table shows the content of an (exemplary) comment. So if you write something like
**hello**the result will be hello. The surrounding stars take care of displaying "hello" in boldface.Markdown is a markup language, like HTML or (La)TeX are. It means that you surround your text with "annotations" to change how parts of it look like.
After writing the text, I added comments to show exactly what each (marked) syntax example in the table does. Looking at them should clarify what the result of it is.
@Eduard: That's amazing! Thank you so much for writing this post!
Gràcies!*Title: Markdown Cheat Sheet
@robin: It's great to see you using Journaly ☺️ And thanks a lot for this feature! I mean, I managed to write 11,000 comments without it, but I'm glad to be able to use it now.
De res, Linda! (Ja he corregit l'error del títol, però l'hauries pogut marcar directament al text, que també té el títol al principi. Gràcies per la correcció).
Musst du jetzt mit deiner extrem hohen Anzahl an Kommentaren angeben? 😝. Vielleicht bist du doch die Königin der Kommentare.
Oh, and I agree with Linda: it's fun to see Robin using Journaly and writing comments around here as well.
Komm schon, das hab ich mir verdient! :D Das war echt nicht leicht, das so glatt zu ziehen. 🙈 Und mit über 5000 Kommentaren bist du auch gut dabei 👑
Heyyy everyone! I tried to get to these as fast as possible and just added the following:
strikethrough text(by surrounding text with a single ~ on each side) - as I said above I think this could be really useful!And thank you @Linda and @Eduardo! I had a great time leaving some comments this morning and always love when I get to write posts and come and hang out with you all in the comments! Until now it's been so hard to make time for it since I'm under the hood working on the engine, so to speak, but I promise I will try my best to be better at making time for this now! 😄
Yeaaah! That's awesome! 🎉 So my to do list is as follows:
3. LaundryWoohoo! It could even be:
😄
p.s. If these checkboxes will be helpful I would like to remove those bullet points 😬
Also: @Eduard I realised what has happened regarding new lines...
This is actually because, well... Markdown! 😅🙈
I hadn't thought about this but, as I'm sure you know, in Markdown if you want to specifically create a new line (unless it's a block-level element) you have to actually write that with Markdown as well.
\at the end - I prefer this method because it is visible to meMaybe I can write some custom code to handle this automatically for people, but I may not be able to get to that right away with so much high-priority stuff to do 😅 I'm dying to finally build In-App Notifications and Direct Messaging, followed by @mentioning!
@Linda: Ja, das hast du dir definitiv verdient. 👸
Two spaces, then a new line.
Yes, it works.
But it also works with twice newline.
What doesn't work is a full empty line (or more).
This was me trying line breaks with Markdown (again) xD.
New line under quote.
Yep, this looks better.
Absolutely amazing what has happened around here today:
Great work, Robin! 👨🎨
P.S. Yes, the horrible bullet points in the checkboxes should go to sleep.
Previously, on Journaly:
Yes, that'd be really helpful, since I (and I think other people as well) got quite used to writing nicely separated paragraphs/lines in the comments.
Hahaha the emoji is also italicized? How crazy is that? :D.
Test of an emphasized 😃 -> 😃 (wonderful!) . Boldface 😃 = 😃 (that's OK).
So here is another potential improvement:
I guess it looks even funnier as a header:
This is a love story 😍 💌
P.S. Who is Eduardo? You can't call me like that, I'm Catalan! 😂
Wow, there happened a lot since I last checked in this morning :D I really like the possibilities to edit comments, thanks Robin!
I'm also looking forward to the other improvements you mentioned, especially the Direct Messaging.
And Eduard, thanks for explaining and demonstrating the Markdown features :)
🤣 omg I'm so sorry @Eduard! I can't believe I did that 🥺🙈 OK now that I see us using the checkboxes, I couldn't un-see those ugly bullet points while eating my dinner so I opened my laptop one last time and now they're gone 🍃🧘🏻♂️🍃
Time to finish my dinner and settle into some cozy language studies for the rest of the evening 😂
Thanks @Caro! I'm happy you like these new things and that you're looking forward to Direct Messaging! I promise I'll try my best to really push hard and get these things built quite soon. I think I will be able to sleep a lot better at night once we finally have those features 😂😴
This looks already great!
@Robin: You seem to be quite busy! 👨💻
What languages are you currently studying? (I am not very active in Youtube these days, so sorry if you already mentioned that somewhere)
@All Journalysts: I extended the table with checkboxes.
@Robin: It's a bit strange that the bullet points are still there! So it looks like the bullet points are still present in the post comments (the comments in the main text of the post, not here).
I like the new features! @Eduard: Thanks for the post. If you hadn't written it I wouldn't havw known that they exist.
@Eduard I just removed the bullet points from feedback comments ✅ Also improved the spacing of all checkboxes while I was there: the margin looked a little bit much to me, and now they look more balanced and line up more nicely with bulleted and numbered lists 👨🏻🎨🥰
Regarding your question, I'm currently actively studying Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Japanese, and recently even got back to playing with Finnish! The latter is purely for fun just a little bit each day - but shh! I haven't actually announced this anywhere yet so anyone reading this thread is among the very first people to know! 😲
@Robin: Oh, the checkboxes look much nicer now! 🎨.
All right, I won't tell anyone 🤐.
Italian! Cool! I'm also considering it for
moreserious language learning. The book I've read for the Multilingual Multibookclub was in Italian (as I wrote here 🤌). And ... uh ... what happened to Catalan? 😅🤭Oh, I almost wanted to tell Linda she can add tables in the comments, now that you added remark-gfm into Journaly, but apparently they don't work (yet?). According to https://github.github.com/gfm/#tables-extension- they are possible. I'm assuming it's something one has to "style" as well. By the way: the autolink literals are great!
A comment about the checkboxes: On my smartphone (Android), the boxes are not horizontally aligned with the accompanying text. There is a small offset (they are a bit higher than the text). I guess this has to do with the different screen resolution, but I find it strange nevertheless. It's nothing dramatic, but I thought I should mention it.
I want tables! 😍
But to be honest: I didn't really miss them in the comment section (yet).
Robin speaking Italian
@Linda: Well, now that you know they are theoretically possible, you will miss them eventually :P. Oh, that's a cool video (I just did an exception to my comment from yesterday where I said I'm not so present in Youtube). Funnily enough, I decided yesterday to start learning Italian actively and more seriously, so I bought an Italian grammar book: https://shop.hueber.de/de/reihen-und-lehrwerke/grosse-lerngrammatik/gro-e-lerngrammatik-italienisch.html. As far as I can tell, it looks really great: It's quite comprehensive and at the same time readable. (I was already a fan of Hueber Verlag while learning German, and this just got confirmed once more a decade later 👍. Only the cover image looks horrible, but well, one can't have everything for under 30 euros 😁).
@Robin: Is this https://www.raiplay.it/programmi/ilprovinciale what you refer to in the video? It's no podcast (it's better!), but it certainly looks really interesting. At least I just opened https://www.raiplay.it/video/2021/02/Il-Provinciale-I-Monti-della-Luna-2f820478-3541-4941-aa95-3b5d1604a4ff.html in the background ⛰️🌕 and got immediately hooked to it :D. Thank you for mentioning it!
Hacky tip: One can download the videos with youtube-dl! 💻🥳