I’m having a small UX problem, when I type a “:” at the end of a line, before pressing enter, a menu appears, to autocomplete the colon into a smiley, such as “:sunny:”.
I then need to erase it and try again. Can I disable this menu ?
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FWIW, that doesn’t happen for me. If I type a smiley using punctuation marks, then when I hit “reply” the system automatically converts it to the yellow smiley, but I don’t get the pop-up smiley menu while typing. I used to, though, so something has changed.
Firefox on a 10.9.1 Mac, with Ghostery and AdBlock enabled.
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I see that as well. It only happens if the colon is preceded by a space. Typing space-colon-return results in 
I find autocomplete things annoying myself, but in this case I never noticed it until you brought it up, because, for me at least, it’s pretty rare that I’ll want to end a line with a colon with a space in front of it.
(Chrome 31, OS X 10.6.8)
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Let’s see.
This showed the menu
:
This did not
blabla:
This did
blabla :
Those get converted, but do not change the markdown code :
Here’s what it looks like :
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This is all very nice, but what are you actually trying to type that you cannot?
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Let’s take this post as an example (so meta !). Here’s what happens :
When I press space, colon, enter, I expect to have on screen a space, a colon, and a line break. But as soon as I press “:”, the smilies menu opens, and “enter” selects the first one.
So I then have to go back to correct this, retype space and “:”, then press escape, then I can press enter and continue my train of thought.
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In what circumstances is space : needed?
What I’m saying is this: in normal English it is kind of unusual to have a colon float with a space in front of it. As in this sentence.
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Can I go off-topic and ask that we have some frownies in the menu?
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Sure there is 
which is :( as you would expect. Beyond that there is the entirety of
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How do I get a hash symbol? It just starts bolding/italicising the next word.
Don’t put it at the beginning of a line, or begin it with the escape character which is backslash.
Hash at the beginning of a line means “I want a heading” to Markdown.
It’s because in French you need a space before a :, but not in English. My typographical style is a bit of a mélange of both styles.
So maybe this problem isn’t really an issue while writing in English. But Discourse could be used on any blog, even if it’s not in English, right ?
I agree that this might be an issue when using Discourse in another locale (especially French).
Really? When? I used to work in a French-speaking country, but that was before the WWW. I can’t think of any reason when I would have needed a space before a colon. Or at least, I was never corrected on that issue.
Well, in France they also print names like
Régis HANOL
So, yeah, 
The rule in French is simple, whenever the punctuation character has two parts (:, ;, !, ?…), you need two spaces (one before and one after the character). Otherwise, it’s only one after.
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So no to the disabling of smilies, maybe some day with internationalization of the project ?
@EpinardsCaramel as well
I’ve always felt deeply that the French got the whole names and addresses thing completely right - it’s operationally correct, in that as a message passes through the system (eg mail), it homes in on its target, until finally you get to the right individual. It’s very clean, efficient, and that’s how I program (financial models, visual basic). It can flex easily too.
In the Anglo system, you have to play fuzzy logic to home in.
We do ?
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