Settings toggle to universally disable composer markdown

[ShadowJonathan]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

Disable markdown on the composer for a user.

Why would you like to do it?

Some users in element-hq/element-meta#1189 would like it, as prepending /plain to every message is not feasable for them.

How would you like to achieve it?

Add a setting under Settings -> Preferences -> Composer

Have you considered any alternatives?

No response

Additional context

This is a breakout of element-hq/element-meta#1189, this is a separate/specific issue, as that issue collates both popping up the UI and disabling the setting into one, while i believe this is better actionable from a Design standpoint.

[aaronraimist]

I don't understand how this is different from element-hq/element-meta#1189

[ShadowJonathan]

That issue is bikeshedding over the warning + in-composer toggle, im mainly coming from comments like element-hq/element-meta#1189 and element-hq/element-meta#1189, which ask to break this out into a settings toggle, which is easier to add and audit.

Look at it this way; to resolve that issue, design will have to look over how/when/if to add that, which can take a while. Meanwhile, i see the fairly obvious missing feature of disabling markdown at all, and i'm seeing issues being marked as dup over it, so i'm explicitly saying that this issue is not, because this deals with a subtly different need.

[dreaddr]

Please just implement an option to disable markdown for gosh sake, I can't believe its taken more than 6 years now.

[bradyt]

Another way to phrase it might be, prioritize and fast-track a feature that prevents the need to write /plain before every message.

[bradyt]

TL;DR, underscores are silently dropped.

Another gotcha moment. User wants to send underscores as text. Since some markdown makes it through, they might expect all markdown makes it. > a quote makes it through, despite Element converting to html quote, the IRC bridge converts it back to markdown, so it is preserved. On the other hand, _some underscored text_ is converted by element to italic html, IRC bridge converts it to control codes ^]some underscored text^O, and some Libera.chat channels have set +c which strips control code formatting, so underscores are not preserved. This is one of several non-obvious issues that can take time to understand what is going on, and would be avoided if users could just have something like /plain as a default setting.

[ostwilkens]

The markdown support causes more trouble than it's worth. I'm chatting, not writing a readme or blogpost.

[niquewoodhouse]

Add a setting under Settings -> Preferences -> Composer

I think that makes a lot of sense.

Just adding a bit of copy to let people know, for now, how they can disabled/enable temporarily for specific messages. I don't have enough insights on whether or not md should be off by default so I'd suggest for now leaving the default behaviour as it is and creating separate issues for that if needed later.

[ShadowJonathan]

Nit/bikeshed; I think the subtext should be;

Override with the /plain command to send with markdown disabled.

...when the feature is enabled, and;

Override with the /md command to send with markdown enabled.

...when it's not.