Insert... (actually, let's talk about code tags)

I think the “Insert…” drop down hides valuable functions such as the code or quote tags.

As a result, it’s not obvious that there’s a code tag feature in place, and people keep pasting code into posts without tags, and they’re hard to read.

There are a few of us who keep telling new people to use code tags, but honestly it’s fighting an uphill battle. Plus, Unity is a very script-heavy platform, so code posts would be very common on these forums.

Can the code tag button be moved into the main bar where it’s a more obvious and convenient location?

6 Likes

YES PLEASE.

+1
Couldn’t find it and googled this thread. Generic “insert” is not so obvious somehow. Strange but true.

It’d also honestly be nice if the forums didn’t strip white space at the beginning of lines. That would help a lot with how unreadable non-tagged code is.

Code tags.

    this
        should
  all
            be
     on
 different
     lines

Not code tags.
this
should
all
be
on
different
lines

1 Like

@Baste
Look
at
all
these
chickens

I think the forum should auto-detect when somebody’s trying to post more than one line of code, and tell them how to use the tag. Curly braces are usually a sure sign of code, so that and the presence of certain keywords (void, public, private, var, string, GameObject between braces) should be enough to trigger a helpful dialog.

That, and tell them not to use var in big capital letters when detected, because 99.9% of the time it’s being used horrendously when code is posted in the scripting forum.

A.k.a. The Twilight Zone.

1 Like

I’d really like to see inline code formatting like you see on slack with tildes: some code. I made a thread about it a few months ago but it died.

2 Likes

Yeah, I use markdown nearly everywhere. It’s an automatic reflex when mixing code and text now. Backticks should be added to the forum markdown, with optional language identification (we need more than the only language in Unity, C#, since we also use various CLI script in server/batch contexts).

1 Like

Pressing
Tab
Moves
My
Focus
To
The
Reply
Button!

2 Likes

Sorry and not sorry to necropost / bump this thread. Being new myself I still recall when I looked for a code option in the post toolbar and didn’t find it.

Even if only 1/10 newbies look for the code option and don’t find it, I think that’s enough to justify the change of putting it on the toolbar. The use code tags posts, while necessary, hardly seem the most welcoming/friendly first responses many new posters seem to get.

Actually, if you view source I think you might see it’s there and it’s the browser not showing the whitespace. Because that’s how HTML rolls.

Something like a message on posting: “It looks like you’re posting code that’s not in a code tag. If so, please use code tags for the sanity of our community or risk being flamed!”