Here is a brief overview of what you can do in the editor on LessWrong. This will change a great deal over time, so I’ll keep a note here of when the latest update was: Friday 5th July, 2019.

Three things you need to know

Highlight text in the editor to get a popup menu.
Whatever you make in the editor will look exactly the same when you post it.
The editor supports markdown and LaTex.

Extra details

If you're on your phone/tablet the editor will be transformed into markdown. If you want an only-markdown editor on desktop, go to your settings to turn it on.
There are extensive online resources for basic markdown on the internet, if you want to find something do use google.
You can use a lot of markdown in the normal editor. Enter the markdown command, press enter (with your cursor at the end of the command), and the editor will render it in real time.
WYSIWYG means what you see is what you get. The editor automatically turns a lot of markdown into the finished product, so what you can see when you hit submit, is exactly what the comment or post will look like after you hit submit. If it looks wrong when you're editing it, it will look wrong when you hit publish.
Use Ctrl-4 to open the LaTex prompt (or Cmd-4 if you're on a Mac). Open a centred LaTex popup using Ctrl-M (aka Cmd-M). If you’ve written some maths in normal writing and want to turn it into LaTex, if you highlight the text and then hit the LaTex editor button it will turn straight into LaTex.

f_i(x) = y_i becomes $f_{i} (x) = y_{i}$ .
$\begin{matrix} S (ω) & = \frac{α g^{2}}{ω^{5}} e^{[- 0.74 {\frac{ω U_{ω} 19.5}{g}}^{- 4}]} \end{matrix}$ (how cool does that look?)
There are extensive resources for using LaTex on the internet, so again, use google to figure out how to write things like this:

Images, videos, and footnotes

Images

Unfortunately, you can't yet upload your images to the website. To include an image in a post, you'll first need to add it to an image hosting site like Dropbox or Cloudinary. Then you can use the native image-adding button that appears when you highlight text. Click on the image to see a menu that lets you move it the left/right/centre.

Videos

Videos can't be used in posts at the minute.

There is a markdown hack you can do instead, that lets you include a snapshot of the video.

Here's the text that will create a snapshot image.

![](http://img.youtube.com/vi/YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID_HERE/0.jpg)

NB:... ,

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