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Comment by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | Hacker News Reader

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Is widely supported to add code. E.g. in Slack, Confluence...

Both examples you gave have pretty rough or nonexistent syntax highlighting support.

Who cares? If I really really really need that (I probably won't), I can open up vim, type `:set filetype=whatever`, and paste it in.

Many people care. Hence, the screenshots.

If it is that essential do both.

Uh oh, even Discord has syntax highlighting support with "```".

It's not widely supported. It's not in e-mail or SMS or Gmail or Docs or Word or a hundred other pieces of software where I communicate.

Yes, I use that wherever it exists. It's great, and you're lucky when it's there. I wish it was everywhere. But as long as it's not, for everything else, there's screenshots.

But all of the software you mention has a monospace option.

The discussion isn't about monospace. It's about horizontal scroll rather than wrapping lines.

And no, no SMS client I've ever seen uses a monospaced font.

SMS does not support images either, and email supports HTML. I'm not all that familiar with Word, but I believe it supports some formatting options too.

It's so bad in teams and they put a rather small character limit on it....

Slack seems to always wrap code blocks. It makes python particularly shit to read.

In my experience copying from some programs preserves long lines. Copying from other programs breaks them at the wrap point. Once the text is cut into lines, pasting can't fix it. I'm not at my computer now so I can't give factual examples. I guess that copying from the output of cat file on a terminal is one of those unfortunate cases.

> I guess that copying from the output of cat file on a terminal is one of those unfortunate cases.

It depends on the terminal. Some will actually preserve the line breaks vs soft wraps. Those terminals will reflow the text when you resize the window.

But if you already have the file you might as well run something like `xclip <file` to copy its contents directly to the clipboard.

If it is that much code attach a file or github link to gist or PR.

That's too much friction - especially since managed users cannot even create Gists in GitHub Enterprise Cloud (ugh). https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/man...

As for attaching a file, I'm usually screenshotting small amounts of code - usually of the ephemeral variety.

Even Google chat can do it.

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