How to Use the New Full Text Editor

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We’ve enabled a new full text editor to make writing posts easier, especially for longer or more formatted content.

Enabling the editor

When creating or replying to a topic, look at the toolbar above the text area.

  • Click the A icon on the left side of the toolbar
  • This switches the composer into the full text editor
  • Clicking it again switches back to Markdown

Your choice is remembered per device.

What the full text editor does

The full text editor lets you format your post visually as you type.

You can:

  • Apply bold, italic, and strikethrough using buttons
  • Add links, quotes, and code blocks without typing Markdown
  • Create bullet and numbered lists
  • Insert emojis and upload images easily
  • See formatting instantly instead of previewing it later

This is useful for guides, tutorials, and general discussion posts.

Markdown is still supported

  • Nothing has changed for Markdown users.
  • You can continue writing pure Markdown if you prefer
  • Technical posts, code blocks, and inline code behave the same
  • You can switch between modes at any time

The editor only affects how you write, not how posts are stored or displayed.

Which should you use?

  • Use the full text editor for faster, visual formatting
  • Use Markdown if you’re comfortable with it or writing heavily technical content

Both work side by side.

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Weekly Forum Summary
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How did I not see this before?!! :sweat_smile:

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Thank you for the update!

When will we get a vim implementation in the reply window? :squinting_face_with_tongue:

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That would be pretty cool! Just for members who opt to enable it. :melting_face:

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Thank you!
Curiously, as far as I remember, when full-text editor was introduced in ‘ubuntu-mate’ discourse, most of us ‘old-farts’ stayed on markup :grin:

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lol. Exactly. I’m still on markup. When Discourse first pushed this update they defaulted (forced) all forums to their new “fancy” rich text editor. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: The option is nice, but I figured most of us appreciate Markdown. Especially as we can be 100% certain that there’s nothing hiding in the input as is the case with rich text editors.

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Besides that, directly entening markdown is often faster because you can keep on typing instead of having to grab the mouse and fiddle around the attribute icons :slightly_smiling_face:

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