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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a browser extension to handle that. It would provide an editing area that would allow you to edit using the same markup on different sites, and when you are done would translate to whatever markup format that site uses and fill in the site's edit area with that.

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There are some bits of typical markdown syntax that I really don't like. Like pasting code requires you to add 4 spaces to the start of every line and an extra linefeed between each line. That's a lot of work and every time I do it I say "How is this better than <pre></pre>?"

I've yet to see what I'd really like: preformatted text being surrounded by markers that make it easy to paste in, like so:

    Some regular text

    vvvvv

    Preformatted text

    ^^^^^

It would be cool if the extension could do that and then do all of that obnoxious formatting for me. Or heck, it could be a full up WYSIWYG editor.

The most common way to do this is with triple backticks:

    Some regular text

    ```
    Preformatted text
    ```

While this isn't in the original spec (https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#precode) it's supported by GitHub, Stack Overflow, and most other places I find myself using a markdown flavor.

This syntax even made its way into CommonMark (https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#fenced-code-blocks)

> ...every time I do it I say "How is this better than <pre></pre>?"...

From Gruber’s Markdown spec:

> Readability, however, is emphasized above all else.

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