Discord seems to be on an update spree as of late. Just a couple of days ago, they finally brought proper message quoting (we reported about it here) to the popular app. And today all those who can’t remember how to format text using Markdown (or who don’t even know what that is) can rejoice because Discord now has a toolbar to format your text.

For what seems like a lifetime, the only way to format text in Discord was to use Markdown. Personally, I never had a problem with this (to the contrary), and I am sure many keyboard warriors out there would agree. But there are always those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Markdown editing or just can’t be bothered to remember the Markdown syntax. And then there are those who don’t even know that you can format your chat text in Discord at all (yes, they exist!). This isn’t really surprising, given that the Discord GUI has no visible clues that formatting exists.

Enter the Discord text formatting toolbar

That all changes today. Discord has pushed an update to all desktop client versions (Stable, PTB and Canary) that introduces a nice little formatting toolbar:

The way this is implemented is pretty elegant and unobtrusive. The toolbar is not visible until you mark a piece of text in the text box. As soon as you do this, the little toolbar pops up and gives you options for common formatting options like bold, italics, codeblocks and strikethrough. It also gives you options for quotes and spoiler tags.

Once you selected one of the options, Discord inserts the corresponding Markdown tags right into your text. It also changes the text accordingly, right in the text box (another update that was recently rolled out).

The toolbar doesn’t give you some of the more advanced formatting options (like syntax highlighting or colors in codeblocks), but that’s fair enough. Keep it simple and offer the most useful options should be more than enough for most people.

Overall, the new toolbar is a nice little touch that I am sure will go a long way. I hope more people will pick up on nice text formatting and use spoiler tags more often when they talk about that final boss fight that you haven’t seen yet.

I really like how Discord has been progressing recently. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.