I have a renewed interest in my Markdown Quicktags project. It’s a WordPress plugin that replaces the default “text” editor with an advanced Markdown editing tool.

It broke with version 4.0 of WordPress, and I let it slide for a while because I’m not using WordPress anymore. Now I’m doing some blogging on sites that do use WordPress, and I was getting back into plugin development as a result, so I figured it was time to update this one.

In addition to visual tweaks, WordPress’s default Insert Media button now works (and inserts Markdown syntax instead of HTML), and the handling of emphasis tags is cleaner (and more intelligent).

If you use the “Quote” command from the toolbar, it will now handle automatically quoting from the beginning of the current line, or for every line in a selection with smart indentation. If any of the lines in the selection are already quoted (> ), it will clear the quote syntax from the block.

If you select text and make it bold, italic, or a code span, the resulting text will remain selected and the button will change to allow you to remove the formatting. In fact, if you select any text with format characters on both sides of it, the buttons will update to allow you to toggle that formatting off.

There are a few other updates, and I’ll be adding to it as I have time. Priority number one was restoring previous functionality, which should all be there now. For more information see the project page, and you can find the plugin in the WordPress plugins repository. Updates will show up automatically in your Dashboard.