Repository navigation
markdown editor formatting problems #1254
Description
Our built-in markdown editors makes some unacceptable changes on save:
## [Unreleased]
## [1.3.0] - 2026-10-20
becomes
## \[Unreleased]
## \[1.3.0] - 2026-10-20
There is some issue around text like <your relay> That was causing rendering problems, I changed it to <your relay>, but I think the editor then changed it back into brackets and broke itself.
When a markdown file has parsing problems (such as <your relay>) it will open in plain-text only, but it's impossible to save. It's fine to open in plaintext only, show the error, that's a great flow. But if the user fixes the parse error and saves, it should then be possible to view in WYSIWYG mode.
Unnecessarily changing newlines after headers: A markdown file that was like this:
## header
body
gets changed to this after save
## header
body
This isn't a massive problem, but it would be better to preserve the formatting of the existing file pre-edit as much as is easily possible. Don't add too much complexity fixing this though...
Activity
dormouse-bot commentedon Oct 20, 2026
#1255 fixes the save problem, and its CI is green; it has not landed yet. After a parse error, MDXEditor never clears its "initial normalization" flag, so the viewer treated every source edit as normalization and the document never became dirty. Edits now count until the next load, so you can fix the file, save it, and switch to rich text. I couldn't run the page in the triage sandbox, so the fix has not been tried by hand.
The other three come from
mdast-util-to-markdown's serializer, and the PR leaves them alone:\[Unreleased]: it escapes every[in running text. Keeping a bare bracket is only safe when it can't become a link or reference, for example when no(,[, or matching definition follows.<your relay>: unescaped, it parses as an unclosed JSX element and triggers the source-only fallback. Stored as text, the serializer writes the<back escaped (\<before a letter), not as the<you typed. I couldn't confirm the exact round trip that broke it again without running the editor.joinrule that never adds the blank line after a heading, but it would also remove blank lines files already have.The bracket escape seems worth fixing first: it appears in every changelog. It needs a decision on how conservative the unescape should be.
fix: preserve Markdown formatting and allow source-mode repairs (#1255 …