It would be great if “>” and paragraph that follows it is interpreted as quoted paragraph.
Similar with “**” for bold text, “*” for italics.
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DC-Desktop already has experimental markdown support. But no citations yet.
For citations I always use italic text with quotation marks.
For citations I always use italic text with quotation marks.
I was thinking just simple blockquotes DeltaChat already supports for replies. Just like above I added “>” just before text you wrote.
And just to explain, the feature is not for when you need to directly to reply to message, rather when you copy and paste some text off somewhere else, to make it appear as something copies/quoted instead original text. Also ability to position quote/text within the message.
Those quotes would not be clickable, if thats enough/ok we can add it to the message-parser (at the time of writing it’s only used by desktop, but we have plans to also use it on mobile once it is considered complete & stable enough).
I guess it would be some rule like if start of input | linebreak is followed by > then treat it as qoute until the next line break or until the next empty line (double line break)?
Sometimes _ is also used for bold, although I don’t know if that is “standard” markdown.
I think Delta Lab also has markdown support, but don’t quote me on that (no pun intended).
If italic support is only for desktop then I suppose someone who receives the message with the mobile app won’t notice the italic. Or maybe the italic is displayed with plain text markdown * on mobile? Anyway, if it works for you that’s great, but support for proper markdown block quotes would be amazing.
It seems logical that those quotes would not be clickable, but I don’t think that would be a problem.
My understanding is the rule would be if start of input | linebreak is followed by > then treat it as quote until the next line break, but if the next line also starts with > then group those into a single block quote.
Of course this could get slightly more complicated if you consider nested quotes with >> which would also be great to have, but single-level block quotes are still a great starting point.
I think, that limited support would be great.
Also I’d propose code blocks and inline code blocks.
As for unclickable quotes, I think it’s totally OK and still very useful.
They are already implemented in the markdown mode of the message parser (so also in desktop if you enable markdown in the advanced → experimental settings): message-parser/spec.md at master · deltachat/message-parser · GitHub
here is a site where you can try out the message parser https://deltachat.github.io/message-parser/
about italics / formatting with _ underscore there are still some issues being discussed in markdown - spec - current implementation of `_` is problematic · Issue #23 · deltachat/message-parser · GitHub
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Naturally it can take time to sort out all the bugs, but it looks like this is only a temporary problem. The later messages in the github issue point to solutions for the current problems, so I don’t think this will be a problem in the long term.
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Maybe it’s worth mentioning that * and ** should follow similar parser rules to _. So if bugs show up for _ because the parser is tested with messages containing words such as ANDROID_NDK_ROOT, it’s possible that there might be similar bugs for * and ** which don’t show up simply because we don’t commonly use words such as ANDROID*NDK*ROOT and therefore we don’t think to test them.