Can I paste a draft in and keep its markdown? +
Yes. The syntax is converted on the way in: asterisks become bold, underscores italic, dashes a bullet list. That is mostly useful when the draft came out of an AI tool still wearing its syntax, because otherwise you would be deleting the marks by hand before you could format anything.
Which keyboard shortcuts work? +
Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italic do what you would expect. Ctrl+U is given to cursive rather than underline, because LinkedIn cannot show an underline at all; Ctrl+Shift+S does the same thing. On a Mac, use Cmd in place of Ctrl. Everything on the toolbar is also reachable by keyboard on its own.
What exactly ends up on my clipboard? +
One plain string, with the styling baked into the characters rather than travelling alongside them as markup. That is why it survives a paste that strips every other kind of formatting, and why there is nothing to go wrong between here and the LinkedIn composer: you are pasting text, not a document.
Does it only work on LinkedIn? +
No. What you copy is plain text, so it works anywhere plain text goes: X, a Facebook post, an Instagram or LinkedIn bio, a WhatsApp message, a Slack channel, an email subject line. It isn't a LinkedIn feature that we're driving; it's Unicode, which every one of those places passes through untouched.
Why is there no underline button? +
There's no underlined alphabet to switch to. The only way to fake one is to hang a combining mark beneath every character, which renders unevenly across devices and breaks wherever the line wraps. LinkedIn has no underline of its own either, so there'd be nothing to match. Ctrl+U applies cursive instead.
What are the 3,000 and 210 character counts? +
3,000 characters is the most LinkedIn accepts in a single post. 210 is roughly where the desktop feed stops and shows “see more”, so everything past it is only read by people who choose to click. The counter tracks both: how much room you have left, and how much of what you've written is above the fold.
Is anything I type here sent to Willow? +
No. The formatter is a JavaScript file that runs in your browser. Your text never leaves the page, isn't sent to a server, and isn't saved anywhere. Close the tab and it's gone, which is also why there's nothing to log in to.
Will the formatting survive if someone copies my post? +
Yes, and that's the flip side of it being characters rather than markup. Anyone who copies your post carries the styling with it, and it will keep rendering as long as their device has a font covering those characters. Almost all do; a very old device may show empty boxes instead.