Add cmd+i and cmd+b for Mac users

If possible to update the editor to allow the use of common keyboard hotkeys to make formatting text faster, that would be awesome. Examples would be ctrl/cmd + i and ctrl/cmd + b to italicize and bold, respectively. And/Or something like the FancyPants editor on Reddit.

Just throwing feature requests out there to see what sticks!

[calculuschild]

So here’s where we are at now:

Why not just add the asterisks where the highlight/selection starts and ends?

So currently, ctrl-i does just that. It creates asterisks surrounding the current selected text.

Now since the original designer hadn’t thought about the case where nothing is selected, ctrl-i weirdly inserted |** where | is the cursor position in that case. Ctrl-B resulted in |****. Pull Request #1078 fixed this “no selection” case so that the asterisks appear around the cursor you you can just start typing words, due to popular request. And it is a nice feature to be able to start typing in italics or bold without having to grab the mouse and drag over the words you want to modify.

I think this combination is pretty reasonable, and removing the no-select option after we so recently added it I think is going to confuse people. 😕 I also like that it follows the other “snippet” behavior of inserting new code, where trying to “remove” a feature just requires extra logic.

If you highlighted the word Some, and hit ctrl I, a set of single asterisks get added to either side of Some and it no longer becomes italicized, but leaves the rest italicized.

This sounds simple in principle, but in reality it wouldn’t work quite that easily. With the update to the markdown parser that will be part of v3, spacing for the asterisks becomes more strict. For example: This is **bold** works fine, but This is ** bold ** will not because spaces are not allowed directly before or after the asterisks. So then, if you want to “unbold” a selection by putting asterisks around it, you really have to know if the region is already bolded, and if not, place the asterisks like so: other words **selection** other words, but if the region is bolded, the spacing needs to go like this other words** selection **other words. If you have selected only part of a word, it gets even more convoluted. I should know, because I rewrote the italics/bold detection for Marked.js to better follow the Markdown specifications just for the Hombrewery, because people were getting all sorts of broken code to do things. Ugh…

Maybe as a future thing though. I’m not putting it completely off the table. Just not a priority for now. If you want to try your hand at a PR I’m all for it!

[calculuschild]

This has been fixed with #1191