Medium’s code block feature begs the question: Has anyone at Medium ever seen a code block?

Elizabeth Westphal
2 min readOct 25, 2022

I haven’t written in a while but today I felt inspired to share a tutorial about a niche and hard-to-find-info-on problem I encountered at work and share my newly found knowledge with other developers. I started writing and noticed a new feature (or so I thought) on the + menu: an option to add a new code block.

This is the first time I took notice of this option in the menu (I’m more of a CodePen person anyway) so I thought “Wow, a new feature let’s try this out”.

It’s fair to say the feature falls flat. It’s better than plain text, and it allows readers to copy and paste so its better than a screenshot — but its worse than literally ever other option available.

function myFunction() {
console.log("Hello world");
}

// Function call
myFunction();

Upon looking back at old articles, I discovered I had actually used this feature before (by using cmd + option + 6), except I thought it was just a way to offset a block of text or add emphasis — because that’s really all it does. It’s lacking even the most basic of features such as line numbers or coloured comments and key words.

Dear Medium, Here’s what we want instead:

1. Coloured…

--

--

Elizabeth Westphal
Elizabeth Westphal

Written by Elizabeth Westphal

Lover of science and statistics, I write short data-backed articles and always cite my sources!

No responses yet