Markdown support

[Angel Ezquerra]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 12:32 PM, Mads Kiilerich <mads at kiilerich.com> wrote:
> On 02/27/2016 04:54 PM, Angel Ezquerra wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is there a way to use markdown, rather than RST, in Kallithea? My team
>> has used markdown quite a bit already, and they like it, but they do
>> not have experience with RST.
>
>
> Agreed, hardcoded RST did not work.
>
> IMO, the main problem is that there are some need-to-haves:
> * simple cut'n'paste of code snippets must just work and give ASCII WYSIWYG
> without any overhead - no eating of _ or funny smileys or mangling of
> whitespace
> * automatic link markup of URLs
> * automatic link markup of revision hashes
> * automatic link markup of bug tracker references
>
> Some nice-to-haves:
> * a way to show images inline
> * colors and fonts and sizing - can make it more aesthetically pleasing and
> readable ... or the opposite
> * semantic markup and syntax highlighting
>
> It is neither feasible to do markup of hashes and bugtracker references
> before or after a markdown to html conversion. It requires deep integration.
>
> Thus, the choice is pretty much between simple text as we have it now on the
> default branch which gives us all the need-to-haves, or a simple markdown
> implementation which will give us all the nice-to-haves.
>
> Personally I see very little value in markdown markup of comments. It has
> annoyed me and obfuscated my comments too often. Instinctively, I am thus
> opposed to having it as default. But I think it would be great to have as
> optional for each comment (dropdown or something like '#md' on the first
> line) or configurable. But that's just my bias. Let's revisit when it
> actually is an option.
>
> (Also, it would be nice to have consistent handling of commit messages. It
> seems like rst markup has some usage in some projects in the Python
> community - I don't know how much markdown is used in other projects.)
>
> You can play around with markup in helpers.py render_w_mentions . You can
> perhaps reuse some parts from how rst_w_mentions still is used on the stable
> branch and in 0.3 .
>
> /Mads

It is true that markdown is not particularly suited for source code.
It is all too easy to accidentally underline or make a variable name
or part of an expression bold. Normally this is solved by using code
blocks (i.e. ~~~) but still, I wonder if perhaps a better solution
would be to only ,allow some safe subset of Markdown (e.g. to make
lists, titles, and so on).

Angel