this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Jerboa

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Jerboa is a native-android client for Lemmy, built using the native android framework, Jetpack Compose.

Warning: You can submit issues, but between Lemmy and lemmy-ui, I probably won't have too much time to work on them. Learn jetpack compose like I did if you want to help make this app better.

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Jerboa is made by Lemmy's developers, and is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

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Feature request: single line breaks (yiffit.net)
submitted 2 years ago by soyagi@yiffit.net to c/jerboa@lemmy.ml
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Jerboa currently ignores single line breaks. I think single line breaks should be implemented as the only other alternative is double line breaks which are not always appropriate.

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[–] andscape@feddit.it 35 points 2 years ago (6 children)

This is not a missing feature in Jerboa, it's a design choice in the Markdown syntax. It's done so that one can break up long lines in the .md file without affecting the rendered page. Markdown is a standard, and Jerboa uses an existing tool to format posts. In order to make this work for Jerboa the devs would have to break compatibility with Markdown and create their own rendering tool. They're most likely not going to do it, and I don't think they should.

That's not a problem, though, because you can already create single line breaks in Jerboa, using standard Markdown. All you have to do is add two spaces at the end of your first line, where you want your line break to be. So, if I write down:

This is a line<space><space>
This is another line

this gets rendered to:

This is a line
This is another line

There are other ways to create line breaks in Markdown:

  • Using an HTML <br/> tag
  • Using a backslash \

but they're not supported by all renderers. For example: the <br/> tag works in Jerboa, but not in the web UI. Double space works for me in both.

[–] soyagi@yiffit.net 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Thank you for the explanation. Good to know single line breaks are possible. However, other web services allow the user to use a single line break and it's displayed in the same way. While you give a good technical reason why it is this way, I'm not convinced it's the most user friendly approach.

[–] andscape@feddit.it 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Which other web services support Markdown formatting and also single line breaks? Reddit, for example, didn't...

Since AFAIK the main reason for this choice in standard Markdown was to make the raw .md files more readable, I can see how this isn't necessary in Lemmy. I still see two reasons not to change this though:

  • Effort: forking and maintaining a markdown rendering library just for lemmy would take a ton of effort for a pretty small usability improvement. The dev team is already small and overloaded with work, this doesn't seem like a good use of their time.
  • Consistency: each website having its own flavor of Markdown syntax would be pretty chaotic for users. Right now you can learn basic Markdown once and use it on Reddit, Lemmy, Github, etc. If every website did it their own way you'd have to remember all the little differences, it would get messy.
[–] soyagi@yiffit.net 0 points 2 years ago

I wasn't talking about markdown language. I was talking about the end user experience. In my email client for example, I can write a single line break and it is formatted as such. The end user shouldn't have to know/worry/care about the underlying technology; the technology should work to meet their needs.

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