Improved formatting with markdown

Background: https://trello.com/c/rFovhOID

There seems to be a bit of consensus on the idea of adding formatting to proposals/comments etc.

I did a bit of research into this while trying to learn integration tests and ended up in favour of Github style markdown as seen here:
https://github.com/mojombo/github-flavored-markdown/issues/1

If it's useful you can have a look at an example of redcarpet in loomio with these changes:
https://github.com/tixpaul/loomio/tree/feature/markdown

There's lots of different ways and styles to do this, if it's needed at all. Thoughts?

This would make me so damn happy. Markdown is so beautiful.

Sweet. Can we use github-flavored markdown with redcarpet? I definitely think formatting for comments is necessary in the long-term, I'm just not entirely convinced on the best way to do it. Does github-flavored markdown provide everything we need? From a non-coder's perspective, would they find it easy-to-use? If we add in a WYSIWYG editor later on would it play nicely?

In terms of markdown... I do like github-flavored markdown better because it handles line-breaks nicely.

Any kind of markdown is all good with me

Ah the github flavoured markdown isn't as easy as a WYSIWYG however:

It is really intuitive, less tech savvy people will be put off only until they try it.

If we just embedded a cheatsheet help button I'm sure it wouldn't take long for people to adopt it.

I typed out a big rant about wysiwyg editors and their validation and sanitization problems butttt then I found MarkitUp.

http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/examples/markdown/

Apparently there's even a github repo with a tidy guide:
https://github.com/ZhangHanDong/rails_markitup

As far as whether it will do everything you need, I believe it's actually the same markdown engine Github actually uses (http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/) and it's really flexible if there was something else that came up.

Ah sweet. That all looks good to me. And I think a cheat-sheet for now would do just fine.

Maybe it is better with WYSIWYG or visual editor, so any member can use it easily.

Totally agree @christaklis. My ideal comment box would have drag-and-drop images too.

I wonder if there are any good gems out there to handle this? If not we should build one!

@richarddbartlett Jack_up looks like it could do the trick

how is that going? because some members of my group asked again and again how to format their text.