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Current behavior: When selecting some text and clicking on the "quote" icon, > are added as well as new lines.

For example:

CRISPR gene editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense system.

becomes

enter image description here

> CRISPR gene editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular
> biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It
> is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9
> antiviral defense system.

Notice how there are line break characters that are actually inserted into the quote, rather than just being a side effect of word wrapping.

Instead, I'd prefer to have:

enter image description here

> CRISPR gene editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense system.

Notice that it only prepended a single angle bracket, with no line breaks inserted. In the post editor, the words will automatically be wrapped, as shown in the image; the text snippet below it is to demonstrate the actual text content.

Would it be possible not to add new lines when using the "quote" button?

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17
  • 7
    I agree. This often ends up being an issue with quotes that are frequently edited (e.g. "notes"): the edits often result in very uneven line breaks that are harder to digest. Much easier to just let the editor display wrapped lines rather than manually wrap with automatic line breaks.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 2:19
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    If you only want a single >, why not just type one? It makes sense to me that the buttons do things that aren't trivial.
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:07
  • 2
    @jonrsharpe I sometimes want to quote several paragraphs
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:22
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    So type several >.
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:23
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    @jonrsharpe so basically you're against the quote button?
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:35
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    That isn't at all what I've written, it's still useful if you want the current behaviour, hard wrapping the lines. If you don't, it's easy to do yourself. You don't really offer a reason why anything should be change, aside from "I'd prefer"; have you seen a rendering problem caused by the current behaviour, for example? The two alternatives you've shown are indistinguishable in the rendered output.
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:40
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    @jonrsharpe what's the point of hard wrapping?
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:40
  • meta.stackexchange.com/a/171312/248731 - but that's not particularly relevant, I'm not advocating for hard wrapping, you're advocating for change. Why isn't this feature-request?
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:43
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    @jonrsharpe how does hard wrapping improve readability on quoted text? I'm advocating for the quote button to do only its job and not something else.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:45
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    Well not really advocating, though, you're just saying you'd prefer something different. Not to put too fine a point on it: so what? It's going to involve someone doing some work, making and testing and deploying a change, which means their other work gets deferred. So make a case, quote precedent (have you read e.g. meta.stackexchange.com/q/171197/248731, meta.stackexchange.com/q/234299/248731 - research is expected on metas too), show how that would be better not just different. Explain why anyone else should care what you'd prefer.
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 8:54
  • The way it's always worked is that you type (or copy paste) a few paragraphs, put a double quote on each end, select the text, and click on the double quote button to place a single > symbol at the start of each paragraph; word wrapping being determined by: your browser, font size, screen width, wind direction, etc. --- Hard breaks are added by putting 2 spaces at the EOL. - Franck's tagged as Support, I see it as a Bug, yet another believes it's a FR. --- G
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 9:03
  • FWIW, if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper, I'd be with you - do the simple thing, unless someone can argue convincingly that we should do the extra work of adding the line breaks. But we're not starting with a blank sheet of paper, so you need to make a case for the change.
    – jonrsharpe
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 9:09
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    Hey folks, I'm moving this back to [status-review]. I'm unfortunately not able to determine what the internal status of this request is easily. It will need some further investigation to determine what the appropriate state of this request is, as well as what our current plans are. For that reason I'm sending it back to the start of the process.
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Oct 3 at 17:45
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    @Slate Looking at Yaakov's comment on his answer, posted at the same time as his tagging this as planned, the plan was at the time to roll out the Stacks editor to everyone that year. Since that's indefinitely stalled, this has thus stalled as a result.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 3 at 19:25
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    @Sonic I suspect you're right, but that isn't necessarily where the paper trail ends. It is possible, albeit unlikely, some other documentation or continuation exists in a place I couldn't easily find.
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Oct 3 at 19:56

1 Answer 1

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16

Marking this specific request as because we are not going to be making any more changes to the current editor.

The good news is that this behavior is functioning as you are looking for in the new Stacks Editor, which is currently live on Stack Overflow for Teams, and which we have plans for eventual release on the public SE network. It is something that we are working on (and will be posting more on MSE soon about editor details, and plans for testing and release).

wont fix now — deferred
fixed in the new editor
more details coming

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4
  • Will the new Stacks editor also be used in tag wikis, profile descriptions and election nominations? That might partially fix this image uploader bug and a few related bugs, e.g. the link button having http:// instead of https:// as a placeholder.
    – Sebastian Simon
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 14:36
  • +1 for the ironically missing newline in the quoted haiku
    – wimi
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 15:00
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    @Franck, while the new editor doesn't show live previews the same as the current editor you can see from this image that the use of the " (quote button) causes one > before and after the paragraph (on the newline); that is shown in the upper image. The result of that is shown in the lower image. Presumably that's very close to what you wanted, with an equal resulting output.
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 15:13
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    @ollie ask me again when the editor is live for everyone, and not just in opt in alpha testing on two sites
    – Yaakov Ellis StaffMod
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 21:40

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