I Can Finally __________!

Here's a tip for those of you on Discord that I just came across and will find very useful in certain circumstances.

I'm appreciative of Discord's ability to format text, so that if I want to (say) make something italic, bold, or underlined, it's easy to do. However, the way Discord does so is by interpreting certain characters as beginning and ending that formatting. So, for example, to make something italic, you surround it by asterisks, *like this*. If you want it underlined, you put two underscores, __like this__.

But what if you literally want an asterisk? Or underscores? What if you want to encourage someone to fill in the ______s or simulate some *!#*$* language?

Well, you can do that with a backslash – \ – before the special character that Discord uses for formatting.

If you want (say) a five-character underline (for some _____ reason), then you just type in \_\_\_\_\_, and it'll appear as you want. (And, yes, if you want a literal backslash, just go \\ and you'll get one \).

I won't use it every day, and it's a bit clunky to do, but my difficulties in using ** or __ as they are have been a quirk I've run into just often enough on Discord that I'm grateful to have a workaround.

And if this is old news to you . . . well, it wasn't to me, and I'm grateful to be part of today's lucky 10,000.

-- Steven Marsh