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Feature request: single line breaks (yiffit.net)
submitted 1 year ago by soyagi@yiffit.net to c/jerboa@lemmy.ml
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Jerboa currently ignores single line breaks. I think single line breaks should be implemented as the only other alternative is double line breaks which are not always appropriate.

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[-] andscape@feddit.it 36 points 1 year ago

This is not a missing feature in Jerboa, it's a design choice in the Markdown syntax. It's done so that one can break up long lines in the .md file without affecting the rendered page. Markdown is a standard, and Jerboa uses an existing tool to format posts. In order to make this work for Jerboa the devs would have to break compatibility with Markdown and create their own rendering tool. They're most likely not going to do it, and I don't think they should.

That's not a problem, though, because you can already create single line breaks in Jerboa, using standard Markdown. All you have to do is add two spaces at the end of your first line, where you want your line break to be. So, if I write down:

This is a line<space><space>
This is another line

this gets rendered to:

This is a line
This is another line

There are other ways to create line breaks in Markdown:

  • Using an HTML <br/> tag
  • Using a backslash \

but they're not supported by all renderers. For example: the <br/> tag works in Jerboa, but not in the web UI. Double space works for me in both.

[-] soyagi@yiffit.net 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the explanation. Good to know single line breaks are possible. However, other web services allow the user to use a single line break and it's displayed in the same way. While you give a good technical reason why it is this way, I'm not convinced it's the most user friendly approach.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 15 points 1 year ago

Which other web services support Markdown formatting and also single line breaks? Reddit, for example, didn't...

Since AFAIK the main reason for this choice in standard Markdown was to make the raw .md files more readable, I can see how this isn't necessary in Lemmy. I still see two reasons not to change this though:

  • Effort: forking and maintaining a markdown rendering library just for lemmy would take a ton of effort for a pretty small usability improvement. The dev team is already small and overloaded with work, this doesn't seem like a good use of their time.
  • Consistency: each website having its own flavor of Markdown syntax would be pretty chaotic for users. Right now you can learn basic Markdown once and use it on Reddit, Lemmy, Github, etc. If every website did it their own way you'd have to remember all the little differences, it would get messy.
[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

We could probably add it easily to the existing markdown library since it supports plugins (in fact, the lemmy link handling is done with a plugin).

But the main reason to not do it is to not be surprising. Ideally Jerboa renders the same as lemmy-ui and other Lemmy mobile apps. That's why standards exist.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 1 points 1 year ago

Oh cool, didn't know about the plugins.

[-] soyagi@yiffit.net 0 points 1 year ago

I wasn't talking about markdown language. I was talking about the end user experience. In my email client for example, I can write a single line break and it is formatted as such. The end user shouldn't have to know/worry/care about the underlying technology; the technology should work to meet their needs.

[-] jsveiga@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, let's embed a MS Word window in the interface instead of the text box, for a full wysiwyg user friendly experience. It could check the user's environment and log in to Office365 using their credentials, thus having access to their templates and onedrive too.

Hey, hey, what about... Teams integration? That would be super user friendly. We could read, comment and post directly from our cosy familiar Microsoft friendliness, never ever needing to know, worry or care about any underlying technology.

But wait! I clearly remember having to know, worry and care about how to use wysiwyg editors. Can't we instead go back to using raw latex tags and vi as the post/comment interface?

[-] owatnext@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I feel like this is asking Jerboa to break a standard.
Markdown is a universal standard, it's what makes webpages look like they do, minus the CSS.

[-] andscape@feddit.it 5 points 1 year ago

Agreed, standards are what make the Fediverse possible. Rendering posts from other platforms is already messy: we've all seen the posts coming from Mastodon where the title is the whole body of the post, cut at the character limit. If Lemmy starts doing its own Markdown flavor it would further degrade the integration with other Fediverse platforms.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yup, and it's one thing I absolutely hated about new reddit.

For example, some links the worked just fine on new reddit didn't work on old Reddit or third party apps because Reddit allowed nonstandard links. And then there was spoiler tags, which used a bespoke syntax that took a while for third party apps to support and has edge cases that caused rendering issues. Spoiler tags still don't work on Jerboa because it's not part of the market spec, but at least Lemmy documents it so it'll probably come eventually.

We should stick to standards as much as possible so things work well across clients.

[-] testAccount@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

Spoiler tags are supported, in Jerboa and lemmy as

title

What am i hiding?

📸

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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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