Would be nice to be able to see inline text formatting previews on mobile.

As I mentioned in my bug report (I got steered here, saying it was unimplemented and not a bug) when you type in a message like *waves hi!* on PC/Web, it shows it as “waves hi!” while you’re still writing it. I find that this is really useful to me, for example if I don’t want to italicize my text it reminds me to put \*’s in front of the pesky asterisks.

Of course, on iOS and Android as I imagine some people know, you don’t get that. I actually had no idea PC had it, for years, until one day I downloaded the PC client, noticed the massively better quality-of-life user experience, and thought maybe it was a bug on mobile.

It’s stressful to remember that “how are you ^_^ hey is that a wombat growing out of your ear o_o” becomes “how are you ^^ hey is that a wombat growing out of your ear oo” unless you can see the preview. I’m always scrambling to edit the message after I send it, since if I’m typing fast, I don’t stop to think about it until I can actually see it.

I know that needing a formatting preview only applies to some typing styles, but it would really give my Xanax bottle some lasting power if I didn’t have to worry about this on mobile.

Thanks, and let me know if you agree that it would be useful! I can imagine it helping for pasting code snippets on the go, too.

I don’t want formatting gone or harder to use, I’d just like some previews. :)