While we're on the topic of HN syntax, I really wish they would add proper blockquotes. Quotes in monospace look ugly, especially on mobile, and quotes that simply start with a “>” aren't visually distinct enough, imo. Just indenting a paragraph when it starts with a “>” would probably be enough.

Not allowing quotes drives users to limit their quoting to a relevant part. I observed other places that users have a hard time to limit themselves and context is always there.

It would also be labor saving and booboo preventing if copying formatted text with elided URLs like "https://bla.com/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/bla/... from postings would copy the full URLs, instead of the elided URLs shown in the text.

Is there some magic way to do that with CSS, replacing the "..." with the rest of the URL when you copy it? (There should be!)

CSS can do that with the "text-overflow: ellipsis" property, but only for fixed-width elements, so it wouldn't really work for links.[1]

Note that if you click the timestamp on the comment, links don't get shortened.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/truncate-string-with-ell...

I think this official page covers all of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I'm don't think that covers everything! I have used that page when commenting, but I'm sure I've seen formatting not described there.

Really? What kind of special formatting have you seen?

I think that italics,

  code blocks,

paragraph breaks, and https://lin.ks are the only formatting options available. I certainly haven't seen anything else.

I've seen comment citations in the past. I still can't figure out how to get those to work.

> I've seen comment citations in the past. I still can't figure out how to get those to work.

Like this? It's just italics and a > symbol.

Nope, like wiki style citations to external links. Maybe it's just some superscript trickery, but I've seen it from multiple people, so I assumed it's a hidden feature.

I think it's Unicode superscript characters¹. Does that look like what you've seen?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...