Preview pane missing?

Discourse Feedback
1

I noticed yesterday when composing a post that the preview pane was missing. Not hidden by another pane, but the lower right of the (desktop) screen was entirely blank. Light mode / dark mode no difference. Ditto trying full-screen, etc.

The edit window showed some weird mix of rendered and un-rendered markdown, difficult to work with. Nothing I tried made any difference, including logging out and logging in again. The Discourse site vaguely suggests others have seen this kind oft thing for some years, and usually blames it on “unofficial:” plug-ins. But their apparent #1 “debugging trick” didn’t help either: enabling “safe mode” also made no difference:

There are other things I could try (e.g., a different browser, reboot the OS, …), but I thought I’d try to establish first whether this annoyance is unique to me before more random thrashing.

2 Likes
2

Discourse has been rolling out updates to the theme and components lately. They have a new editor that defaults to rich text mode (WYSIWYG) but that can be toggled to plain text (Markdown) with the button at the top left.

2 Likes
3

Appereantly a WYSIWYG editor got implemented. You can switch between them with these buttons:

image

image

1 Like
4

The WYSIWYG editor is definitely a downgrade for those already familiar with markdown as many things aren’t supported, but are still escaped as if you meant the literal text typed. I found this surprising recently as it was rolled out without notification, and while removing the preview[1]

  1. there was no real indication the editor was WYSIWYG, as the only MD feature in the post was something unsupported, footnotes ↩︎

4 Likes
5

Thanks, all! That was it. I never would have guessed.

For reference, the keyboard shortcut to switch modes (at least on desktop) is Ctrl+M.

6

Agreed. And the fixed-width text in the plain text editor is annoying as well (variable width looks a lot closer to the final rendered text, even with markup). I guess I’ll get used to it, but I can’t say I like it :slightly_frowning_face: Downside of a web app, I guess - you get what they deploy and have no choice…

Edit: And having just checked the preferences, there are zero options to customise the editor :slightly_frowning_face:

4 Likes
7

Yeah, as soon as the change rolled out, I switched to the plain text one, but I am considering making a local CSS override to switch the font to Lexend for readability.

2 Likes
8

Some more browsing on the Discourse Meta site reveals they’re aware of all that’s been said here, and that this is still a “work in progress”. Still bugs to fix, and options to add. I didn’t, however, find an answer to why they rolled out such a dramatic change to the default behavior before it was closer to complete.

In the meantime, while there isn’t yet an explicit “sticky” setting for users to pick their own default, it seems to me that the system remembers the last mode I used, and uses that the next time I post. Not something I read about, just my empirical observation.

For example, this reply started in the older Markdown editor.

Yes, the switch to a fixed-width font annoys me too, but that’s also something they’re already getting negative feedback on.

6 Likes