Sometimes you want to write something with broken lines and you write in the editor:
That’s right I’m Sokka
It’s pronounced with an Okka
Young Ladies, I rocked ya!
But it ends up looking like this:
That’s right I’m Sokka It’s pronounced with an Okka Young Ladies, I rocked ya!
The fix is to add two spaces between the final character and the carriage return.
I don’t understand what the problem is. CR should be easy enough to translate, and the users intentions are clearly confirmed because they’re looking right at what the expect it to look like when they hit submit.
Why does the user have to add two spaces? Why is the universe like this?
Edit: Holy Shit, look, I’m just an idiot typing text expecting WYSIWYG and I don’t see a good reason for why I’m not getting it other than that programmers lack theory of mind.
Markdown? https://stackoverflow.com/q/35177253
Ah, so that’s where it starts, but why isn’t it “fixed”? What benefit is there to leaving it like that?
People are writing text, not code and they’re expecting the editor to the heavy lifting.
Because it is useful to many people in certain contexts. It’s not a bug. It truly is a feature. Not something to be “fixed”.
You may prefer your ice cream strawberry flavored, but that doesn’t mean any ice cream that is instead chocolate flavored is “defective” and needs to be “corrected” or “fixed” to make it strawberry flavored.
It can help to give an analogy. But in this case it would be more clear if you would demonstrate the usefulness of this feature by explaining why a user wants to prefer to hit enter and not get any result, instead of hitting enter and getting a newline.
https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.world/comment/24735359
Also:
You mean “hit enter and have it not affect the rendered output.” It does produce a result. It makes it appear/act differently in the editor. That’s not “not getting any result.” Just “not getting any result” that’s visible in the rendered output.
Your explanation is solid but it’s also very dev-centric.
Wysiwyg has been a solved problem in GUI for over 40 years, when people first started using editors like MacWrite and WordPerfect/Word.
Web browsers still don’t have a wysiwyg editor built in after decades of development, thereby forcing developers to use js-like solutions. Which obviously suck as you mention.
So developers resort to a minimalist markup language like markdown (even though html is already a markup language) but then still the implementation is not up to par with what users expect. Most developers aren’t skilled in UX and resort to doing things “the dev way”. That is the explanation why pressing Enter doesn’t always introduce a new line for ordinary users, trying to type a few paragraphs of text on a discussion platform.
Because it is how the format is defined. There is nothing to fix. You write text in paragraphs by default and if you want it to be displayed in any other way you need to declare it. Most formatting is done before the text, like headings and lists, but this newline without a new paragraph is declared with two trailing spaces.
I
declare
it
by
hitting
an
entire
button
dedicated
to
making
a
new
line
that
also
makes
a
new
line
in
the
editor
I’m
looking
at
creating
a
new
line
after
I
hit
the
button
that
creates
a
new
line.
It doesn’t make sense from a user perspective, whatever the format is (provided your users aren’t programmers).
Well, you are free to declare your own flavour and try get it supported by whatever editors and libraries you use. Damn, you can make up your own format that works in any particular way you want to. I bet in this time and age you could vibe code it with functions to your heart’s desire.
But bitching about it to people that are trying to be helpful and explain why it is like it is will not render much other result than said people dropping you into their blocklist for being annoying.
Fair. Apologies.
This issue is that you gave me kind of a detailed answer that didn’t really answer my question: What is the BENEFIT of doing it this way in the face of unexpected behavior to a naive user? Two answers others have given are that it allows easier cut-and-paste, and it allows users to break up their text for their own readability on narrower displays while still allowing it to be formatted to fit the final screen. Your answer of “Is is the way it is because that’s the way it is” is logically unassailable, yet lacks explanatory power.
I’m with you on this one. The behavior is not as people would expect it.
Hitting enter/return should result in a newline. That’s what users expect.
The UX is inconsistent because it shows a newline in the entry screen, yet doesn’t show it after submitting.
I’ll say that the formatting options with the * and the _ and the ** are all pretty awesome. I wish every editor was like that.