BTrem

Markdown Blockquote Hack

While writing a markdown post, I thought of a nifty hack to insert text as a block quotation using Thunderbird.

Format for Block Quotation in Markdown

A block quotation in markdown has a greater-than symbol and a space at the beginning of each line, like so:

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit
> sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore

The Hack

  1. Copy the text you want to quote.
  2. Switch to Thunderbird. Start a new message and move to the area where you’d type the email body.
  3. Select the menu option Edit > Paste as quotation.[✲]
  4. Rewrap the lines using the menu option Edit > Rewrap.[†] The text is now wrapped, with each line prepended by > .
  5. Copy the newly reformatted text.
  6. Finally, paste it in your markdown text editor.

Block Quotes in Other Programs

You might be able to accomplish this with other software. (A different email program? maybe a Usenet client?) Undoubtedly the menu options will be different.

notes

  1. Paste as quotation is also available via keyboard command Ctrl + Shift + O on Linux and Windows, or Cmd + Shift + O on MacOS.
  2. Rewrap is also available using the keyboard command Ctrl + R on Linux and Windows, or Cmd + R on MacOS.

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