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I sent an email today (or wanted to) from Inbox by Gmail and was disappointed at the apparent lack of ability to format text as code when compiling an email:

enter image description here

How can I format text as code (or simply in any different font, for that matter) with Inbox by Gmail?

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
15

You can install the Markdown Here extension for Chrome and write the code in markdown format in the email compose window.

You can either write the code with a four-space indent:

    this is
    some code

Or with the triple backtick format:

```
this is
some code
```

Then, to turn the markdown code into a properly formatted email, activate the extension by right-clicking and selecting Markdown Toggle from the menu, clicking the extension button next to the address bar, or using the hotkey Ctrl Alt M.

Before and after screenshot:

screenshot

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3
  • If you input something that looks like a web address in the code (say foo.bar.baz.edu or /afs/spam.eggs.edu/usr/staff/qwerty), will Inbox turn it into a link anyway after you click "Send", or will it leave it in plain text as it should?
    – arekolek
    Aug 18, 2016 at 22:42
  • Answer to self: yes it will turn them into links even though it shouldn't.
    – arekolek
    Aug 18, 2016 at 22:57
  • @arekolek are you sure it was converted to a link by the sending client rather than the viewing client? Remember a lot of clients will display plain-text as links.
    – jhabbott
    Oct 25, 2016 at 21:09
3

You can’t (just yet, I think, currently being a work-in-progress type of product). There is no such option at the moment. The help page only lists the bold, italic and underline options for the text (under Format text).

(I don’t have Inbox, so I can’t test this, but you could try pasting a formatted text from a different source.)

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3

This is now easy to do, it seems to have been added a few weeks ago:

enter image description here

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1
  • This suffers from the fact that Inbox doesn't treat it as pre-formatted text, so it will for example turn text into a link when it thinks it encounters one.
    – arekolek
    Aug 18, 2016 at 22:45

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