feature request: markdown support in commit message descriptions

[boneskull]

I often write my commit message descriptions in GitHub-flavored Markdown, and it'd be nice to:

• Enable markdown syntax highlighting in the commit message description text box
• Optionally render markdown when displaying a commit message description

Possibly related to #951.

[DanPristupov]

That's a good request, but it's way more complicated than it looks.

MD is literally a format for rendering HTML. Despite its apparent simplicity (for the user), it's a total nightmare for a programmer. To prove that this idiocy isn't accidental, there's the CommonMark specification that backs it up (https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/). The format is so complex that until recently, every parser had a list of cases from the spec that were handled incorrectly.

I've tried to write my own MD parser 3 or 4 times, and every time I've told it to go to hell.

All existing parsers either just convert MD to HTML or create an AST that's just as complex. Even simple expressions consist of paragraphs. Off the top of my head, here's an example: ## **strong with **strong** in it** and `code` in header.

The only way to render this monster is in a browser (HTML+CSS). And I don't want to stick a browser control into every tab in Fork. That's a whole separate can of worms that also eats up a ton of memory.