What is the markup language used in Basecamp?

Question

You can enter text into Basecamp discussions, to-dos, and text documents. And you can use basic formatting like bold, italics, lists, and quotes.

However, I once copy/pasted text from another program and saw an inline hyperlink appear ("some text" anchored to a web address). I really want to use inline links, but I can't figure out what markup is required.

Wikipedia notes 37signals as Textile users. And there's an old "product" blog post that indicates that it is Textile. But, the linked reference page is now defunct, appearing to be a cached version.

I tried the basic Textile link syntax and a variety of Markdown formats, but nothing worked.

"some text":http://example.com

Answer 1

When the New Basecamp launched, there was an article or blog discussing the editor; but for the life of me I can't find it now. Yet here are the basics of what it mentioned:

The editor is meant to be WYSIWYG, and does not interpret Textile or any other markup language.

It interprets hyperlinks in its own way (e.g. shortening them for display purposes) - you can't customize them in any way.

It also does some interpretation of pasted richtext (e.g. from MS Word) and attempts to auto-save.

That's it - it doesn't attempt to do anything more than this - keeping things simple & minimal.

I don't think this was exactly the answer you were hoping for :) yet I hope this info is helpful.

Answer 2

Open word, create an hiperlink copy it and paste it to the basecamp editor, so you can get a nice MyLink

Make sure you clean up the garbage code added by Word.

Yes, this is how you roll on basecamp. I think they believe the user should implement suboptimal features so they don't have to build(and maintain) the ideal ones.