Hello,
from time to time I want to write a little equation in mailspring, for exampel I could write 2*3 = 3*2 the problem is that when Mailspring sees two “*” on the same line, it changes the font to italic and deletes them.
In some code (i.e. libreoffice) immediately pressing backpace ot ctrl-c undoes the automatic formatting, but there is no way to do it in Mailspring. Also, I could not find any way to disable this functionality.
Is there any workaround?
p.s. this automatic substitution happens even inside blockquotes and code blocks
Over a year later and not even a response. I’m more than a little amazed that the devs decided to do this without any ability to disable it. Even escaping the asterisks doesn’t work, so it’s not even proper markdown.
I’m going to have to go back to Thunderbird, even though I hate it. This is absolutely a non-starter.
Could there be some option to escape special characters, like asterisks, please? Creating a plain-text reply seems like a workaround rather than a solution to the problem.
The rich text editor in Mailspring does convert markdown-style syntax (like *text*) to formatting automatically — that’s by design for the HTML composer, but I understand it’s a problem when you need to type literal asterisks or equations.
The best workarounds:
Use plain text mode for that draft — hold Alt (Windows/Linux) or Option (macOS) when clicking Compose or Reply to open a plain-text draft. No formatting will be applied.
Disable rich text globally — in Preferences > Sending, uncheck “Enable rich text and advanced editor features”. This switches the composer to plain text by default for all messages.
There’s currently no option to keep rich text enabled but disable specific auto-formatting rules. That level of control in the editor is something worth adding, and I’ll keep it in mind for future improvements.