Post #3267195

2026-06-08 00:31 UTC

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Okay, the thing that Gets My Goat about typing into a thingy with a Bold button is this. You've got a document. It's got a bit of bold text in it. You place the cursor next to the bold text. Will the next thing you type be bold, or not? (The answer is always "whatever would be most obnoxious". I have no idea how they have such good predictive technology for the sole purpose of making things bold when they shouldn't be and not bold when they should.) Sometimes this is a case of "is that space bold or not" (something I always want to have to wonder about), but sometimes it's literally whether placing the cursor on a formatting boundary puts it inside the formatting or not. When you're writing markup, you're screwing around with markup, but at least you don't have to deal with any of That.

Replies (3)

@whbboyd@infosec.exchange 2026-06-08 00:33

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Back when I used a WYSIWYG word processor, I vehemently disliked Word and used WordPerfect (probably just dated myself pretty badly there) because it had a "reveal codes" mode you could use to interact directly with the formatting codes and e.g. figure out if the spaces surrounding your bolded words were bold.

Open ##3267196
@cptbutton@dice.camp 2026-06-08 00:37

@whbboyd@infosec.exchange @ifixcoinops@retro.social I firmly believe that many companies have an explicit "Department of Software Annoyance."

Open ##3267205
@maypop@bark.wolp.chat 2026-06-08 14:32

@whbboyd@infosec.exchange @ifixcoinops@retro.social i think tumblr's post editor is pretty good. the edge of a formatting style effectively acts like a character for the purpose of the arrow keys. so if the caret is inside the edge of the bold part, the bold part is highlighted and what you type will be bold, but if you press "right" once, the caret doesn't physically move but the bold part becomes unhighlighted and what you type will not be bold.

Open ##3267206