View Markdown source of foreign messages

[martinvonwittich]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

It is currently easy to get the Markdown source of your own messages - just hit the up arrow key to open the editing view, and you can easily copy-paste the Markdown source of your own messages, e.g. to post the same message in multiple chats.

Unfortunately, it is not as easy to get the Markdown source of messages posted by other users. Currently the only way is to click on "View source" and to extract it from content.body, but this has two significant disadvantages:

• It's not obvious how to do this to normal users which have no tech background
• The text is formatted as JSON, which implies that newlines are expressed as \n

This makes copying the Markdown code from foreign messages practically unusable.

The use case I have in mind for this would be e.g. to collaboratively extend a list. The first user might post:

• foo
• bar
• baz

and someone else might want to extend this list to:

• foo
• bar
• baz
• barfoo
• bazfoo

This would currently involve manually recreating the formatting each time.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like the ability to easily view (or at least copy) the Markdown representation of a foreign message, e.g. by clicking on the three dots next to a message and choosing a suitable option that does this.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• The "View source" option could be extended so that it has two tabs:

  • View Markdown source

    This will show the message formatted as Markdown.

  • View message source

    This will show the whole message source as JSON, as "View source" currently does.

• Message editing could be extended so that it allows users to open the edit view for foreign messages, of course only having the ability to save changes for one's own messages.

[turt2live]

Not all messages are markdown - riot just happens to use markdown. Also, there is an argument to be made that it shouldn't be easy to copy other people's messages and instead possibly use different tooling to accomplish the task.

[MadLittleMods]

Closing in favour of #10649