How to write a nicely formatted post in Discourse/Forum

[petsam]

Writing a well formatted post in the forum (Discource powered) is important, if you want readers to easily read and understand.
It’s especially important for terminal output.
Here is a brief tutorial.

---

Terminal output

For terminal output, text output with special characters, always use code wrapping (Pre-formated text).
Select all of the text and do one of these:

• Hit the </> button in Discource Post Toolbar.
• Press CtrlShift+C on your keyboard.

Manually with markdown

After you Copy your text, …

For a Block of text

• one line with 3 “back-ticks” (usually the key under Esc),
• one empty line hitting Enter
• one more line with 3 “back-ticks”
• press Up Arrow to go in the empty line and Paste clipboard contents (Ctrl+V)

Example:

Write this
```
Text from terminal output
```
to get this

Text from terminal output

For Inline text

• one “back-tick” at the beginning and one at the end of a word/phrase

Example:

Write this

Use `sudo pacman -Syu` to update your system

to get this

Use sudo pacman -Syu to update your system

---

Quoting paragraph (which is often wrongfully used for terminal output) :

• Start the paragraph with >

Write this

> My smart answer 

to get this

My smart answer

• To combine paragraphs and/or empty lines, use > in empty lines between

> Nice idea
>
> One more idea
> 

Nice idea

One more idea

---

Section titles

Start paragraph with 1 up to 5 # followed by a space, like

# Top level 

Top level

## 2nd level 

2nd level

### 3rd level 

3rd level

---

Separate sections with a horizontal line

• Create an empty line (with Enter) followed by a line with 3 dashes, or 3 asterisks

 --- 

or

***

---

Create lists

Numbered list

Start the line with a number, a dot and a space

1. First
2. Second
3. Third 

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

---

Bulleted list

Start the line with an asterisk or a dash, followed by a space

* Think
- Draw
* Paint
- Ask 

• Think

• Draw
• Paint

• Ask

---

Disable special characters preceding it with backslash \

This is \*not bold*

This is *not bold*

---

End Note: Most of the above can be used with

Select text and click a button at the Post Toolbar’
You can see their keyboard shortcuts hovering the mouse on each button

---

Now you can’t say I didn’t know how to format my post contents properly