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A Better Editor

by Max Barry
Thu, 14 Sep 2017

Your words are important. Other nations should tremble at them. Or be moved. Sometimes comforted. It depends on the situation. The point is: important.

That's why we're making it easier to send your words out into the world, where people can rightfully tremble at them, or be moved or comforted or whatever. Most places you write words now comes with a little toolbar like this:

BIU

That provides handy insertion of formatting tags like bold, italics, underline, and links to nations and regions. Additionally:

  • There are keyboard shortcuts (including for preview).

  • Your unsent posts are automatically saved as drafts and restored when you come back.

  • Admire a raft of small cosmetic enhancements.

@ Mentions

One important change is how the @ key works. Previously, you would stick @ on the start of a nation name and hope that at some point it would convert into [nation] tags to make it linkable. Now it happens in real-time, so @ followed by a few letters will trigger auto-complete, allowing you to select the nation or region you want with the arrow keys or a click or tap.

If you ignore auto-complete and keep typing, the @ won't do anything any more. So the good news is you no longer have to worry about @ transforming into tags when you didn't mean for it to do so. For those times when you do want to quickly apply [nation] tags to a name without using auto-complete, there's the new editor toolbar and the accompanying keyboard shortcuts.

[nation] Tag Defaults

Another significant change is that [nation] now defaults to the short version of a nation name. For example, "[nation]Testlandia[/nation]" now becomes Testlandia, not The Hive Mind of Testlandia. You can still use either, specifying what you want with variants such as [nation=long], [nation=short], and [nation=long+noflag]. But if you don't, you get the shorter name.

Unfortunately this is also a retroactive change, which means that some posts and dispatches that relied on the default without specifying it will have changed. I'm sorry for that; it was unavoidable.

As always, please report bugs in the Technical forum. And expect more improvements in this area in the future, like more tag support when editing dispatches! Because your words matter.