Auto-escaping square brackets in Markdown hyperlink syntax

[JohnFullard]

I'm loving jotty so far and almost all of the markdown syntax within the rich text editor has been seamless on the fly. One thing I have run into is when trying to add a URL with the [link text](link URL) markdown syntax, the rich text editor automatically escapes the square brackets. You can see this if you switch to the markdown editor: \[link text\](link URL).

This is pretty easy to work around just by highlighting the text I want as the link text and then pasting the URL but I'm curious if there's a setting I'm missing since this is the way I'm used to entering links.

[yhay81]

You are not missing a setting. In the current editor those are two different editing models:

• Visual mode is a Tiptap/ProseMirror rich-text editor. Text typed as [link text](URL) is inserted as literal text; there is no input rule that turns that sequence into a Link mark.
• Markdown mode is the raw Markdown editor and is the mode in which that syntax is parsed as Markdown.

When you switch from Visual mode back to Markdown, Jotty serializes the rich-text HTML with Turndown. Because the brackets are literal text in the document, escaping them as \[link text\](link URL) is intentional: without the escapes, the round trip would silently change literal text into a link.

You can see the current flow in TipTapEditor.tsx: Markdown mode is parsed to HTML when entering Visual mode, while edited Visual content is converted back to Markdown when leaving it. The Visual editor only configures the normal Tiptap Link extension; it does not add a [text](url) input rule.

So the supported workflows today are:

• type [text](url) in Markdown mode; or
• in Visual mode, select the text and paste the URL, use the link toolbar, or use Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+K (the configured link shortcut).

Supporting the typed syntax directly in Visual mode would be a feature rather than a preference: Jotty would need a Tiptap input rule that recognizes the complete pattern, replaces it with the label, and applies the Link mark. Your existing select-and-paste workaround is therefore the best Visual-mode path at the moment.

[fccview]

Thank you for the assist!
Worth adding @JohnFullard that it's likely possible but not sure how long until I'll have capacity for it!

There's a huge pull request I'm working towards with a very important refactor, so that's most definitely priority ❤️

[JohnFullard]

@yhay81 @fccview thank you both for the explanation! This is such a minor thing and easy to do in multiple other ways so I don't think it's worth adding a feature request for.