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I often feel that it would make my comment much more clear if there is some line-break. For example, I sometimes want to add two different points in one comment and I would like to separate them as a list.

There is a help button next to comments

Comment section It leads to short formatting help and from that it is possible to get to Comment formatting page. There is an advice to use <br/> tag to insert a line break. I tried that, but it didn't work. You can see that in the comment section below this question.

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  • Example of line break <br/> that doesn't work
    – TGar
    Dec 18, 2018 at 9:46
  • You could always do this...
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:05
  • @TheLethalCarrot Yes, after Rand al'Thor's answer I also run to that :D.
    – TGar
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:07
  • 3
    It's unfortunate that not all sites support MathJax formatting. On Mathematics SE for example, you can write comments with line breaks by abusing $$ notation.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:09

2 Answers 2

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Per my understanding you can't have linebreaks in comments.

This misunderstanding is caused because only the highlighted yellow area is the comment formatting help, the rest is just general markdown help. This isn't the easiest to tell but you can work it out by looking at the line underneath the yellow area:

collapse | the above section is quoted for convenience from the full editing help, below.

Also if you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see the "Comment formatting" section that you can expand which shows everything the yellow section does. Also if you just visit https://scifi.stackexchange.com/editing-help you will see there is no yellow area and the "Comment formatting" section is still at the bottom of the page.

The main meta post How do comments work? does state that you can't insert line breaks in comments, it also says there was some hacky workaround at some point but by the looks of it this has been "fixed".

It is not generally possible to insert line breaks in comments, though some hacky workarounds exist.

From the same post it is also worth noting that when moderators turn an answer into a comment line breaks are stripped.

Moderators have the ability to convert an existing answer into a comment. The answer must have at most 600 characters, line breaks will be omitted, and the exact same Markdown will be used to form the comment. Note that this is only done in exceptional cases, if an answer makes no attempt to answer the question but is still valuable for some reason.

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  • Oh! You are right. Thanks. Do you have any clue, why the comments are limited in formatting?
    – TGar
    Dec 18, 2018 at 9:53
  • @TGar Comments are only meant to be temporary and short so I guess they just didn't feel the need to implement it but you'd have to ask an SE employee to get the true answer.
    – TheLethalCarrot Mod
    Dec 18, 2018 at 9:55
  • Makes sense (even if I am not happy with that :)). Thanks again.
    – TGar
    Dec 18, 2018 at 9:56
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Nope.

Comments don't have formatting tags or line breaks

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  • Thanks for the link!
    – TGar
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:06
  • Although you can add italics and bolding and code
    – Valorum
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:06
  • @Valorum That was a bold move, si.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Dec 18, 2018 at 10:08

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