Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love this extension and it's been a stable part of my workflow for the last 2 years or so.

For people who are asking what the use case for this is have clearly never tried sending chunks of code over email (especially a auto-word-wrapping HTML client like Gmail). Markdown Here allows me to create beautifully formatted code blocks which are readily shared with the rest of the team and beyond (Even non-Engg love reading well formatted blocks of markdown).

My workflow for a lot of mails sent out to other teams involves the following template:

----

Hey there! I ran into this error while running XYZ service. The error seems to be with a background sync script that is failing to update data. The call and params along with the response is shown below:

```

insert block of code here

```

Please let me know how to resolve this. We can get over a quick Hangouts call if necessary.

----

Select and "toggle markdown" using the extension. Send!

YMMV, but this extension has been a gamechanger for me! Thanks for an awesome extension! :)

> Thanks for an awesome extension!

You're welcome! (I won't reply to every positive comment, but...)

The impetus for me to create Markdown Here was mostly a) code blocks, b) nested bullet lists (which are fiddly and hotkey-heavy in a rich editor). (Brief origin story, fwiw: http://markdown-here.com/about.html )

Any chance of creating a Brave extension? https://brave.com/

I know probably not, but it's the only browser I use for gmail. It's so convenient keeping it open in the background, isolated from my main Chrome browsing workflow. Whenever I get an email I get a nice OSX popup. I know Chrome can do this too but I restart Chrome like five times a day.

Brave is pretty good, but doesn't get much love. Hopefully it'll catch on more.

Thanks for your work!

Is their crypto currency ad replacement system in play? I recall that being one of their very early pitches.

Do they have tabs on the side?

Nah. Admittedly the tabbing kind of sucks. You can't even tear off tabs into windows.

Tabbing is an interesting thing... I've always been jealous of Firefox's tree-style tabs, which are impossible to implement on Chrome. But never quite jealous enough to give Firefox another shot. Yet.

Try Quantum, in beta until next week. Just trying it now and very impressed:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#beta

Beware. Tree style tabs has become quite slow on newer Firefox (nightly)

A few seconds of research suggests that it's worth investigating more (i.e., it seems like Chrome extensions might be supported without too much effort). https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/issues/465

I was one of those people wondering why I would use this and I have sent code via Gmail without problems. Personally I generally prefer plain text email. But I could imagine trying this out. Nice to see some positive endorsements.

If I am not mistaken, this is plaintext email. Traditionally, email had bold, /italics/ and _underline_. Markdown just extends on this. The danger is, however, that people continue to create their own Markdown extensions and we end up with emails, that are full with those "control-codes", which makes them ugly for anyone, not having a transformer in their email-client (aka: those, who read the plaintext)

You're mistaken. This converts the markdown HTML and sends an HTML e-mail. There wouldn't be much point if the receiver required a plugin they're unlikely to have. http://markdown-here.com/features.html

Usually Mail clients send mails as multipart/alternative with both a text/html and text/plain.

It makes sense to keep the entered markdown as the text/plain part. But if this looks ugly, then the plain text view won't be as pleasant.

PS.: I hate all companies that think their newsletter only needs text/html, and put a "Please read me with an HTML-compatible mail client" as text/plain.

Most html mail I get just links to a jpg poster in crappy resolution.

How about replies to such emails?

The need to quote previous emails or reuse pieces of them often arises - it would be convenient if the original markdown source was available, but with HTML, is it convenient?

Wow. I thought this was just a little neat. When you pointed out writing code, it instantly clicked for me that this has real power to improve my process. I love markdown in Slack for sharing code. I will inline commands and snippets all the time. Now I can do it in emails easily. Huge win!

> I love markdown in Slack for sharing code. I will inline commands and snippets all the time. Now I can do it in emails easily. Huge win!

Once upon a time email was always pure text, and you'd have been free to use Markdown to your heart's desire.

I think that the Right Thing™ here would be for mail clients to support RFC 7763, which specifies the text/markdown content type.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com