Tdesktop: Option for message formatting (-- to ‏‎−, >> to », << to «)

[ghost]

Hi.
I want to report a bug in the telegram desktop version. (Linux)
The problem of the character: Dash. Or (-)
When two characters Dash, taken together, the result rather than the (--) becomes a long line. (‏‎−)
But when the two characters together Dash, the text first, this problem does not exist.
For example:
http://s4.picofile.com/file/8173777318/snapshot.png

[CyberMew]

What's the problem that's causing this issue to not be fixed within a short period?

[auchri]

Because it's not an issue for some people

It's a feature, not a bug

[ciuff]

maybe make it an option? enable/disable auto formatting

[auchri]

Yes, that's why I added the enhancement label

[Mindstormer619]

:+1: This is a REAL pain when sharing something like a couple lines of code. Especially when the code is too little to use a pastebin, but then there go all your cout<<"Hello world"; statements.

[auchri]

Also don't remove multiple spaces

[xenogenesi]

+1

why not using a modifier for the replaced text? Like alt+-

Best would be to have a way to escape the text to send, untouched (without Emojis or replace at all)

Please leave the original text as it is, is really a pain passing command lines between Mac and Linux (try using it with a terminal noob and then call it a feature again), I think is just this code in historywidget.cpp:

QString HistoryWidget::prepareMessage(QString result) {
    result = result.replace('\t', qsl(" "));

    result = result.replace(" --", QString::fromUtf8(" \xe2\x80\x94"));
    result = result.replace("-- ", QString::fromUtf8("\xe2\x80\x94 "));
    result = result.replace("<<", QString::fromUtf8("\xc2\xab"));
    result = result.replace(">>", QString::fromUtf8("\xc2\xbb"));

    return (cReplaceEmojis() ? replaceEmojis(result) : result).trimmed();
}

(btw, nice app, keep up the good work)

[ralesk]

Those four lines should just be dropped. Those who want to use those characters will enter them (character map, keyboard layout, whatever other means).

[ghost]

Updates? This is really frustrating, especially for IT guys like us!!!

[nvx]

This is an issue for me as well.

[auchri]

@Mindstormer619 you can now surround your statements with `, for example `cout<<"Hello world";`

[Mindstormer619]

Yes of course. Thanks a lot for this :smile:

[nvx]

Not sure why the 4x +1's in quick succession, but didn't this get fixed already? Single backtick quoting for inline quoting, or triple backtick for block quoting.

[neongreen]

@nvx: single backticks are for stuff like code, bash commands, etc (and it shows, correspondingly, in monospace font and a different color). While this covers most (but not all) cases where -- or >> is used, it'd still be nice if it was possible to turn autoreplacement off completely for people who never use it (because we have ‘—’ and ‘«»’s on our keyboards, or for some other reason).

Generally, I don't see why not add customisation options for _everything_ that people request to have an option for. If devs are worried that too many options would harm usability for people who don't want to customise everything, they could just put rarely used options on some separate page (like µTorrent, Firefox, Chrome, etc all have done with the concept of customisation flags).

[akomba]

This is easily the most annoying "feature" of telegram. Please get this fixed or make it optional. Thank you. I love the rest.

[edmundlaugasson]

In 0.9.40 still not fixed :(

[Lithas]

I agree, the '--' syntax is really useful for a lot of things (for example, our chats use a bot that implements per-user karma by scanning for "user++" or "user--" comments. There are workarounds, but none of them are intuitive or easy to use.

[aix27249]

+1 to fix this ASAP. It is really, really frustrating, especially when you forget about this 'feature'.

Even if someone is using this, please make this optional.
p.s. Such auto-replacements are not performed in any other Telegram client (such as mobile), so I don't see any use-case to have it enabled by default.

[stek29]

@Noiwex Maybe your coworker would use ``` next time?

[oslerw]

Using backticks isn't a valid workaround for display names. I'd like to put two literal < in my name, but it always gets converted.

[Innomen]

So apparently they've "fixed" this by spreading the bug (no, it's not a feature when it lacks an off switch, simply apply this logic to the light in your bedroom) to additional clients. (Android at least.)

Might be the last straw for me. Might be time to switch apps altogether if this one is just gonna turn into the incredimail/myspace of IM solutions.

[lindhe]

Also, I don't think it makes sense that -- becomes — (aka. em-dash). It would make more sense to convert it into – (aka. en-dash) and have --- become — as in LaTeX.

In English, em-dash is much more common than en-dash, but in Swedish en-dash is the standard. So it's really useful to be able to write both (especially for me on Linux, where unicode input does not work because of QT or something like that).

[ralesk]

@lindhe I would say to be able to type –, or ” for that matter, is the task of your keyboard layout, not some application (and no other application, apparently, Telegram Desktop is unique in mangling these characters in messages).

[joshsleeper]

@john-preston @auchri
This issue is easy to fix, has no real negative consequences of fixing it, and has been active for _way_ too long.
Telegram is first and foremost a chat application, not a tool for writing technical documents or prose.

Please just remove those four cases of forced autoformatting (in all clients) and be done with it.

[lindhe]

@ralesk Not quite true. All applications using Markdown does this (Github, Reddit and Slack comes to mind). I like markdown, since not everything can be written very nicely only using the keyboard (especially bold and italics, but also having different types of dashes is useful and rare to find on keyboards). I just wish Telegram was more consistent with it.

One would expect the usual unicode input thing (ibus?) to work properly, but that is not Telegrams fault: #1033

[Lithas]

I would probably be willing to give up my decrement if I got native bold and italics. Without getting the other benefits of markdown, however, this really makes no sense to me.

[ralesk]

@lindhe I haven't had Slack change my -- or my " into anything it shouldn't be. Markdown is an entirely separate issue, but it does interfere with *doing things in asterisks* which, since we lack /me is all we have — just something to keep in mind there. I do agree that supporting it the same way is important, and as such the first Markdown rollout in Telegram was a pain and a mess.

I don't think GitHub changes these either, even outside of verbatims -- if anything these should remain as they were, and I haven't employed anything "strange" in the source of the message either. (Preview said dashdash and ASCII quotes)

[ralesk]

(To go on a tangent with the Markdown thing: if there's a reason I like BBCode is that it's so obvious and extensible, and does not interfere with random things by accident (interpreting rogue asterisks and dashes as formatting); too bad it went out of fashion)

[Reloecc]

I would like to join all the people here: may we get rid of it, please? If needed, keep it for mac users only.. they deserve it.

[tarstars]

+1

This feature is really annoying when sending some code snippet. Please, provide a way to disable it.

[eddex]

I wrote a telegram bot that runs brainfuck code. It's common to have code like <<<+++>>>--- etc.
The bot can't be used with the Telegram desktop app because of this "feature". I have to convert the characters back to normal on my server, which would not be necessary if the text would just be sent as is.
As many mentioned before, I think it would be useful to have a setting to turn this "feature" on/off.

[lindhe]

@eddex For that rather specific use case, maybe having it it code style (using surrounding backticks `) would suffice?

[ctrlbru]

Really frustating when you paste command lines or plsql snippets, should be an option.

[proea]

@auchri

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/522#issuecomment-154837695
it does not work for multiline text

[ralesk]

@proea triple ` works for multiline.

[ralesk]

That said the preformatted characters is exactly something nobody wants.

[stek29]

@ralesk I do.

[proea]

@ralesk Thanks

```````(9) changes automatically to it makes impossible to write triple in the body 33

[ralesk]

@stek29 Curious. What's your reason for it? Pretty much everyone I've talked to via Telegram is annoyed by the random text replacement.

(EDIT: oh, I just realised the ambiguity of "preformatted" — yes, I want and use the monospace font feature to paste code blocks; no I don't think we should have to use code blocks to avoid getting random characters replaced on the whim of the developer)

@proea Yes, that's the limitation of the markdownish syntax being used. Raise it in a separate bug. But I don't think it's common to want to type triple grave inside a code block.

[stek29]

@ralesk Because I use -- as — a lot :)

[auchri]

@stek29 I think you are the only one 😉

[lindhe]

@stek29 In all other applications, I can write — by typing unicode 2014 (on Gnome (Linux) that is Ctrl+Shift+u2014, and I know there is some kombination to do it in Windows too). It's just bizarre that Telegram can't do it.

In LaTeX and most flavours of markdown, em-dash is --- while -- is en-dash. So it's still stupid that Telegram has it this way.

And, as already mentioned, there is no way to revert the change. I don't know how many times I have had scripts fail because someone pasted it in Telegram.

[proea]

@lindhe I agree with you!

[ralesk]

@lindhe This is a Qt application. The CtrlShiftU thing is a Gtk-only feature, sadly not adopted by X11 or as far as I'm aware, Wayland, and Qt believe that it should be the job of something lower down (again X11 or Wayland) and they refuse to implement it :D (not sure to smile or cry tbh)

[lindhe]

I'm aware. 😿 😭 😭

[Walkman100]

@ralesk Ctrl+Shift+u, 2014, Enter works for me in Telegram Desktop.

[edmundlaugasson]

@Walkman100 _Ctrl+Shift+u 2014 Enter_ does not work for me. Using Telegram Desktop 1.1.19.
When to create dash using mentioned shortcut keys in some text editor and then copy to Telegram - then there are seen those dashes but when to copy such command from message directly to command-line and press enter then you will get errors because these dashes are not correct ones. You can try e.g. with command _sudo dpkg --configure -a_

[lindhe]

@Walkman100 What version of Telegram are you using? What OS are you running and what package did you install?

[Walkman100]

Telegram Desktop v1.1.19, not installed from a package (what?), Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa, Qt: 4.8.6, KDE Development Platform: 4.14.2, Plasma Desktop Shell: 4.11.11

@edmundlaugasson Don't get me wrong, I am completely in favour of dropping this "feature" completely, I know how painful it is

[ralesk]

hahahaha FOUND IT

You know what enables CtrlShiftU in Qt/KDE applications? iBus. I quit it and the feature disappeared.

[Walkman100]

Hah, yep that did it. Quit it from the notification panel and Ctrl+Shift+U disappears. BTW anyone who did this to test and can't figure out how to start it again, ibus-daemon -d does the trick. Also > ibus version gives IBus 1.5.5.

If anyone has IBus running and Ctrl+Shift+U doesn't work in telegram, try right-clicking on the IBus icon in the system tray => Preferences => Advanced tab and tick the "Share the same input method among all applications" checkbox (image)

[lindhe]

This seems not to be enough for me. I installed iBus (1.15.6), ran ibus-daemon and made sure "Share the same input method among all applications" was active. No luck.

I'm on Arch Linux, running Telegram 1.1.19 with Gnome running in the background of i3wm.

[ralesk]

For the record: I'm on Fedora 24, Mate desktop, and had iBus so I can type Japanese on it but haven't actually messed around in the settings whatsoever... No idea if Fedora does any config wildly different from Arch.

But the tangent aside: I still hope Telegram will stop mangling messages at some point. (whatever happens with triple-tick messages on editing also seems to show something horribly wrong is going on instead of the raw message getting parsed up for display)

[Innomen]

Guys, telegram is now the Facebook of IM clients. They've got their vendor-locked base, and now it's all about fluff features and the downhill run. (Race to the bottom.) The server code will never be open sourced. And you're almost certain to never see the changes you/we want.

[john-preston]

@Innomen Facebook never had (and never will have?) open-source client apps :)

[Innomen]

@john-preston
So if the NSA released an IM app, with an open source front end and a closed source server you'd call it open source and trust it.

/smh

I guess we collectively deserve all this abuse.

Keep cheerleading for a Russian billionaire. I'm sure you'll rake in all the thumbs.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pavel+durov+telegram+censor+back+door+register&atb=v76-2_u&ia=web

P.S. Unsubscribed. The last word is yours.

[SepehrP]

Helo. How can I write in blue format in telegram?

[ralesk]

This isn't a support forum, and there's no colour markup in Telegram.

[mikevmk]

Fuck this shitty "feature", is it too hard to make this optional?

[wsxy162]

Telegram is no a input method, I don't want it to determine which word need to be transformed. That's not the client's business.

[AndydeCleyre]

I just want to clarify that surrounding text with backticks, any number of backticks, is absolutely not a solution, as it will miserably mangle text which already contains backticks.

If you really think text mangling is a feature, please run a poll, split by platform, to see if your users agree, or if you are working against them.

[JuanPotato]

I'm totally going to attempt to add this in, hopefully they accept the PR.

[davtur19]

Could you put in the settings a way to disable this "features"?

[JuanPotato]

That's the plan yo

[JuanPotato]

Update: if I could compile this then I might have had something by now

[louwers]

Sad to see this being a problem since 2015... Telegram is used extensively by tech-savy users. Sharing console commands and snippets of code is a pain with this 'feature'.

No other application besides Microsoft Word does this, and even there it can be turned off.

Should just be removed altogether in my opinion. I don't want to live in a world where every application implements it's own macros.

[stek29]

Telegram is used extensively by tech-savy users

That's not true.

[davtur19]

Instead of continuing to say crap about the fact that it is useful, do you want to put a button to disable it or not?

[NicMan37]

even for me this "features" is hateful

[Emulator000]

An option should be implemented in order to choose the exact desired behaviour

[louwers]

@stek29: Did you read the rest of my comment? A lot of users are annoyed by this (as evidenced by this thread). It's a bad design to have every app implement its own macros, especially if it can't be turned off.

[Vechus]

This is stupid. You should almost add one of these three possibilities:

1. a button to activate / deactivate this feature
2. custom characters for formatting
3. only hotkeys for formatting like every text editor, so you can avoid any other problem

[JuanPotato]

Y'all should stop being so damn hostile towards the developers of something
you get for free

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 9:10 AM Luca Vecchio [e-mail] wrote:

This is stupid. You should almost add one of these three possibilities:

1. a button to activate / deactivate this feature
2. custom characters for formatting
3. only hotkeys for formatting like every text editor, so you can
   avoid any other problem

—
You are receiving this because you commented.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/522#issuecomment-376880714,
or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJFxhFNoRL-CIjjZyaH4xOP-pw3R0rkLks5ti4vDgaJpZM4Dm-lE
.

[Vechus]

Yes sorry if I showed hostility about that, I just think it's better to add one of the three corrections I proposed to avoid any problem with formatting. Everyone has his own keyboard, OS and habits, so if you add the possibility to customise hotkeys / characters for formatting text, that would be just good and nobody would get any trouble while texting.

[PeterMX]

I'm totally going to attempt to add this in, hopefully they accept the PR.

@JuanPotato do you get progress?

[ricardo-vargas]

+1

[JuanPotato]

@PeterMX see the message following that one directly

[PeterMX]

so I made a PR, let's see what happens!

[davtur19]

I found how to fix this without recompiling everything, I used x96dbg and I applied a patch, for those who want this is the patch to apply

• Open Telegram.exe in x96dbg
• After which you import the patch and apply it
  It works on version 1.2.15 of desktop telegram, it is very likely that it will not work on another version, so make a backup of the old exe file

File name: patch.1337
Content of the file:
>telegram.exe 00883FC8:50->58 00883FC9:F8->0B 00883FCA:12->17 0088401E:C4->58 0088401F:09->0B 02830B59:3C->00

Before applying the patch you can check what is going to change so you can be sure it is not a dangerous change

[k3a]

Unbelievable, such a pain in the ass and they were unable to fix it in 2 years calling this a "feature"?! Seriously, this is a major problem!! Please don't tell me I have to make a private fork of the client to apply that #4553 patch or do binary patches to fix this!? I would like to see a person who daily writes two dashes, has emoji replacement turned off and expects -- to be replaced by "—", complaining if it doesn't do it. If you really believe such person exists, please approve that #4553 merge request. We, IT people, are sharing UNIX double-dash commands often and this wastes our time. Thank you.

[JuanPotato]

@k3a I've said this before and I'll say it again, don't be so damn hostile
towards the developers of a program you get for free. We're all humans,
treat them with some respect.

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 2:41 PM K3A [e-mail] wrote:

Unbelievable, such a pain in the ass and they were unable to fix it in 2
years calling this a "feature"?! What the fuk, seriously, this is a
major problem!! Don't tell me I have to make a private fork of the client
to apply that one line #4610
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/pull/4610 patch to fix this!?
I would like to see a person who daily writes two dashes and expecting it
to replace to a — bullsht. Can't you make it configurable? We, IT
people, are sharing UNIX double-dash commands often and this wastes our
time.

—
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/522#issuecomment-382098977,
or mute the thread
https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJFxhGrYQvU96IUf6J3G6eCN274nSc91ks5tpjd2gaJpZM4Dm-lE
.

[k3a]

Sorry, I over-reacted, I agree. I am also a developer so I know how difficult it is and I also actively donate money to free software projects. But the main reason was not that "I miss a feature and I demand it from a free program". The reason was that it is a serious problem known for 2 years, wasting people time world-wide, requiring a few-line change and someone called it a "feature" almost closing this as "WontFix". This would be similar to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=30636. But I don't want to start an offtopic or waste your time, I just explained my overreaction and sorry again. I love Telegram and devs have made an awesome work so far but this should have been fixed a year ago already. :P I really hope they will accept your PR...

[Reloecc]

@k3a you know you can enclose your text with tripple to get it not re-formated, right? just do a```--bashcommand```

[ralesk]

We know @Reloecc and it doesn't matter. No other application replaces -- with — and >> with » and so on. It's unexpected and it's bad practice.

[hertell]

Please get this annoyance fixed. Text i write should be sent and received unaltered. It's hard to understand why this is so difficult to get. I have not seen any reasonable reason why this idiotic textconversion has to be done without asking the user!!

[ralesk]

@stek29 ???

[zeroone2numeral2]

@ralesk replacements can be reverted with backspace, from the latest release

[john-preston]

@ralesk It doesn't happen in clipboard paste.

It doesn't happen in monospace blocks, including possible blocks (not-yet-closed blocks staring with backtick or triple backtick).

And it can be reverted by backspace or ctrl/cmd + z in all other cases.

[john-preston]

@Noiwex Sorry :(

[joshsleeper]

@john-preston
many of us really appreciate the effort to help make this less of an issue, so thanks a ton for that work!
:+1: :ok_hand: :heart:

that said, I'm really having a hard time understanding why you feel to strongly about keeping this replacement by default.

can you help us understand why, even amidst all of the comments here and otherwise, you still feel that the automatic replacement is the correct default?

I feel like you've held your ground pretty well on this topic and I'd love to know why.

[john-preston]

@joshsleeper Because it is too small a thing to be kept in Settings at all (they're complete mess right now and adding some strange checkboxes that are irrelevant for 99% of users will make it even worse), so the only way of keeping them at all is keeping them on by default.

For the majority of users this is not an issue at all, because they don't post some C++ code or I don't know what else. For some of the left this is a feature, because this is an easy way to type popular in text conversations non-english-layout symbols.

I really don't wee where exactly that gives a problem except for the C/C++ code snippets that you write by hand in the message field (not past from your code editor) and you don't use markup for them (like surrounding it in backticks). But for those extremely rare cases you can just undo the replacement.

[hertell]

I have been using this version of Telegram on a mac from more or less from the beginning, but this idiotic Microsoft-way-of-thinking where someone/or something decides what i should write instead of letting me write what i want DRIVES ME just CRAZY.

I did a quick test with the other osx-version of telegram found here https://macos.telegram.org (https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift), and that version DID NOT replace my -- with − or >> and << with « and ».

I am tempted to switch to the other telegram, but that version too has some fishy issues going on like that the actual binary-version is not matching the source which again seems to violate the GPLv2-licence (https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/issues/166). If that mess will be sorted out, then I'm going to swap.

just my 5cents...

[joshsleeper]

@hertell right idea, but it feels like the wrong attitude.
We're requesting that someone change something for us in an app we don't pay for whatsoever.
If we want them to do the work for us and give us what we want, we need to show some respect for all the work they already do.

---

@john-preston thanks for much for the timely, detailed response. I super appreciate it.

I totally get your stance that most users (an assumption, but probably a correct one) aren't posting code snippets back and forth in Telegram.
I've done it, most of my friends have done it, but I acknowledge that we're probably not the majority here.
Point valid and acknowledged. :+1:

I also acknowledge that you view the settings menu as far too cluttered, which I more or less agree with. I'm sure that's something that can be resolved in the future for sure, and I'd wholly support some sort of "Advanced" settings category for toggling micro-level app adjustments like this.

What I will say is that, regardless of usage, I strongly dislike having my chat programs automatically change my message contents for any reason.
This isn't just about -- to ‏− or >> to », but about expectations and separation of concerns.

Expectation Examples

• I do expect my mobile phone keyboard, regardless of program I'm using, to automatically correct my spelling or typos.
  
  
  
  • side note: I _also_ expect my mobile phone keyboard to present me options for _disabling_ those automatic corrections if I so choose
  
  
• I do not expect my desktop keyboard, regardless of programing I'm using, to automatically correct my spelling or typos.

These expectations generally hold true, and apply the same across the operating system.
Most desktop keyboards do nothing to adjust what was typed, and most mobile keyboards help us constantly because typing accurately on a 3" wide keyboard is, unsurprisingly, hard.

Taking those examples a step further, I would say:

• I do expect specific programs (generally document writers) to automatically replace some symbols as I type, because programs designed for specific purposes have specific needs.
  
  
  
  • Microsoft Word is one such obvious example, replacing symbols like " and ' with smart quotes, -- with en dash, and --- with em dash. These are deemed sensible replacements, because Word is a document writer, and designed specifically for writing things like documentation, articles, and essays. Note that _many_ people still disable these replacement features out of various frustrations that come with using the specialty symbols.
  
  
• I do not expect non-document writers to automatically replace some symbols I type _unless_ there is a clear trigger/token for doing so.
  
  
  
  • This includes messaging programs, browsers, email programs, music management software, text editors, and numerous other categories of software.
  
  
  • Messaging programs and text editors are two oddities in that both sometimes may offer completions or replacements using tab/enter as a key to accept the change, but these changes almost never occur automatically without the user's distinct input acknowledgement.
  
  

Broken Expectations

While the character replacements in Telegram may be viewed as useful by some, there's no denying that they go against these expectations that I believe many of us hold.
Yes, you're providing a way to quickly undo the replacement, but I would argue that it's significantly more sensible to present a way to quickly make the replacement.

Take a look at GitHub's token system for example.
If everytime someone typed the word laughing it was automatically replaced inline with 😆, people would riot.
However, by tokenizing that replacement with :laughing: instead, they ensure that the only time they're doing text replacement is when a user has explicitly informed the system that it would like such replacement to happen with the surrounding : : tokens.

This gives the user explicit control over how the messages they send are presented, rather than having to constantly tell the system that it made the incorrect assumption.

Final Thoughts

I would request that you give this some more consideration.

At the end of the day, I still feel strongly that this feature is not just undesired, but actively frustrating for a specific chunk of the userbase.
More importantly, I still believe that we're not being unreasonable as to why it's frustrating for us.

4553 already attempted to implement the setting for you, but you seem rather averse to a setting given the state of the settings menu which makes sense to me.

I believe that the number of people bothered by the removal of this autoreplacement is probably extremely small, especially since it only applies to a select few character combinations.

Again, thanks for all your hard work and don't let the angry mob get you down.
Just because we're opinionated doesn't mean we can't be rational, and I hope you can see why we're convinced that keeping this feature is more irrational than rational.

[alvgalrus]

Sometime around the start of June I started to miss the << conversion to «! That autoformatting is useful in Spanish, we use that symbol for quotation!

If you want to keep code as is, use the triple back accent ``` and don't mess non-English languages...

Also, packed with this change, I found that when I type "~", the editor shows a long line,
but the chat shows it fine.

P.S. BTW, striketrough seems to kick in with single symbols instead of double ones here in GitHub...

[k3a]

If you need the automatic "<< conversion to «" then there is something wrong in my opinion. Maybe you should have a « key on your keyboard then. It's like wanting §§ to do š in czech.

[alvgalrus]

My keyboard is a ISO-Spanish standard one. It doesn't include the "« »" characters.

This was a nice feature from Telegram to us, in a tiring English-centered world. By recommendation of the "Royal Spanish Accademy", angular/latin quotation marks are preferred:
http://lema.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=SSTAZ5sDyD6h59vijX

As I already stated, disabling formatting was already addressed with the triple back accent ```, which I was using before. Most of my contacts aren't tech-aware users and, in fact, they were who pointed me to this feature being removed.

[john-preston]

@EmuAGR If you have "Replace emoji" enabled in Settings those replacements (<< to « and >> to », together with -- to —) should work right while you type.

[alvgalrus]

Thank you for that tip. I wanted the feature best as before, but I think this is a fair tradeoff.

[hertell]

As @joshsleeper pointed out, there are people who have expectations on how different applications behave. What drives me nuts are those applications who try to outsmart their users in any way. Eg Msword beautifies the text people write by default, but luckily this can be disabled without any problems.

I would though say that creating any application that tries to outsmart their users are completely on a wrong track. That will never satisfy all of the users and there will always be someone who will not be happy. That's why I have the strong opinion that anything that gets autocorrected should not do that by default. For example domain-names containing unicode-characters can be rewritten into punycode (the name translated using just pure ascii-charactes) by people not being able to write those characters. So what would happen if someone would be writing an URI in punycode like http://xn--caf-dma.eu (http://café.eu)? Telegram would send this user to either a non-existent site or a completely wrong site!

[wsxy162]

Actually you can't expect that every software integrate a typing feature as you want or not, the right place to do this is setting a global input method and it's by OS/DE side.

[hertell]

@wsxy162 Exactly!!

[ruv]

Regarding Settings at all (yes, they already need a "search in settings" functionality), why don't to have just a config file with all these rare or very special options (in addition to the already exists shortcuts-custom.json)?

[blacklat]

Because it's not an issue for some people

It's a feature, not a bug

you're wrong, if the character shown is different from the one provided it is an error

[ralesk]

Vaguely related is the replacement of ®, © and ™ with some emojis that are :registered: :copyright: and :tm: — those three emoji not only shouldn't exist (every semi-modern character set and font since the 90s has native ®, ©, ™ marks), but also they look jarringly different from the text itself.

Unfortunately this fad is massively popular elsewhere as well (Discord forcibly replaces too, upon entry).

[CyberMew]

Wow. Just got email update for this. 5 years since my post and this thread is still going strong 💪 😂 😂

[albertnetymk]

When I share text containing backtick (`) between my PC and phone, the lack of options to turn this off does feel annoying. Plaintext is enough for me.