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Ask HN: Why do ppl surround words with underscores?
I've tried Googling but I haven't been able to figure it out. I've seen it used exclusively by hacker-types and have always wondered what it was about.
- frostmatthew 11y agoIn some implementations of markdown underscores italicize the word(s) they surround. On HN this is achieved with asterisks.
- dikaiosune 11y agoI could have sworn I saw it used in email in like 1997 to indicate underscores in plaintext.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoYup. Markdown is directly inspired by this _ππ«π π¦π’π«π±_ convention ;)
- viraptor 11y agoIt's just used to emphasise a word. Asterisks, _underscores_, /slashes/, -hyphens-: they all work for that. It just lately got more standardised with the markup languages that they actually correspond to bold, underscore, italic, etc.
- corysama 11y agoI'm typing words in a comment. I want to underline one of them, but HN doesn't support that. So, I surround the word with _underscores_ and hope that you understand what I meant. Same for /slashes/ to indicate an italicized word.
- sjs382 11y agoIt's shorthand for text foratting when you only have ascii characters to dela with. *Bold*, _underline_, /italics/, etc.