Lemmy uses Markdown for storing/displaying comments, specifically the CommonMark flavor with some extensions, as documented here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html

And yeah, no, that doesn’t have a way to underline,

except

maybe

one

of

these

here,

depending on the Markdown implementation in the client. Some clients might also choose to underline the highlighting, that’s normally 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤.

Links may be underlined as well.

Well, and then you’ve also got this thing, which is certainly a line under this text:

On Lemmy, we also got strikethrough. Priorities, I guess. 🙃

But yeah, no proper, consistent underlining in Markdown/Lemmy. 🥴

Oh man, I just checked what it looks like in Firefox:

I had written that comment in the Jerboa app (and fiddled with it to make it look reasonable):

when the software (in this case, lemmy’s md to html engine) tries to do the rendering instead of the browser.

And nope, in this case I added the Unicode for the underline myself. Well, I used this app. That passes straight through the MD→HTML conversion without being touched.
And it actually is rendered by the browser, but yeah, by the browser’s Unicode+font rendering, not the CSS engine. Or in case of Jerboa, by Android’s Unicode+font rendering.
Would certainly be nice, if these would look the same. 🫠

Tried it by now and I have to say, it is a lot tenser than it has any right to be…

It’s on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.sesu8642.feudaltactics

Yeah, it’s just your usual buttons:

• Bold → Fett
• Italic → Kursiv
• U͟n͟d͟e͟r͟l͟i͟n͟e͟d → U͟n͟t͟e͟r͟s͟t͟r͟i͟c͟h͟e͟n

Looks like a Logo script to me…

I always feel like the much bigger challenge is whether anyone can still maintain the codebase afterwards. You throw away so much institutional knowledge by doing a conversion like this…

On Monday, one of our students at $DAYJOB asked me what projects I do in my freetime. After I infodumped on her for half an hour, she asked in disbelief “And you do these in your freetime, without being paid?”.

Like, mate, did you not listen how feckin’ excited I got just then? Of course, I do these in my freetime.

To be fair, though, the last project I told her about is very dry. It’s a library to help automate CI builds. And the thing I’m thrilled to build is a compile-safe API for accessing the packages in your workspaces. Like, yeah, it does take a special kind of nerd to get excited about that…