The Toolbar
Every button is optional, and which ones a field offers is up to Toolbar Buttons:
| Button | Shortcut | What it writes |
|---|---|---|
| Heading 1–Heading 6 | that level exactly, so clicking H3 on an H1 line makes it an H3 | |
| Bold | ⌘B | ** around the selection, or the word under the caret |
| Italic | ⌘I | _ around the selection, or the word under the caret |
| Strikethrough | ~~ around the selection, or the word under the caret |
|
| Quote | > |
|
| Code | ` around a selection on one line, a fence around one spanning several |
|
| Link | ⌘K | [text](url), or [](url) with the caret in the brackets when a URL was selected |
| Entry | ⌘⇧E | opens Craft’s element selector, see below |
| Asset | ⌘⇧U | opens Craft’s element selector, see below |
| Bulleted list, Numbered list | - and 1. , toggling between each other rather than stacking up |
|
| Snippets | ⌘⇧K | blocks of Markdown you define, also on /. See Snippets |
| Markdown guide | a syntax cheatsheet, in a popover off the button |
Shortcuts work whether or not the button is shown, so a field with the toolbar switched off still has all of them. On Windows and Linux, Ctrl stands in for ⌘. Asset is ⌘⇧U rather than the ⌘⇧A you’d expect, because macOS browsers keep that one for themselves and it never reaches the page.
The buttons fold into a menu when the toolbar is too narrow to hold them all. Snippets and Markdown guide are the exceptions: each opens a panel rather than writing anything, so they stay put at the end.
Floating #
With Floating Toolbar on, the buttons leave the header for a panel over the text, pointed at whatever’s selected. It sits above or below depending on which side has room.
This isn’t a look, and it costs something. The field opens with no formatting buttons at all, the Markdown guide among them, and they turn up only once an author selects something. Good for authors who write Markdown all day, bad for authors who don’t, which is what the setting really chooses between.
Half of what the toolbar offers goes in at the caret rather than around a selection: a heading, a list, a quote, an entry, a snippet. So the panel doesn’t only answer to selections.
| A selection | the panel appears, pointed at it |
| ⌘⇧F | the panel at the caret, with nothing selected, until Esc |
| Esc | puts it away until something else is selected |
It stays put while a menu it opened is up, follows the text as the field scrolls or reflows, and goes away when the field loses focus, when the Preview tab comes up, or when the text it was pointing at scrolls out of a field that’s hit its maximum height.
Headings #
However many heading levels you tick, the toolbar shows one control. Six near-identical H icons in a row is a lot of toolbar to say one thing. What changes is its shape:
| Levels ticked | What authors get |
|---|---|
| None | no heading control at all |
| One | a button that applies that level outright |
| Two or more | a dropdown listing them |
The icon is the same plain H either way, with the level named in the tooltip, so the toolbar doesn’t shift about between fields. New fields start with Heading 2 on its own: level 1 is nearly always the element’s own title, so body content starts below it.
Entry and Asset #
Both open Craft’s element selector. Entry writes a link. Asset writes an image as  and anything else as a link, taking the alt text from the asset when it has some.
With Parse Reference Tags on, both write a reference tag rather than a URL:
[The Difference Engine]({entry:19:url})
so the link survives a slug change, or follows the file if it’s replaced or moved. With reference tags off there’s nothing to resolve the tag later, so they write the URL instead. An entry with no URL of its own writes an empty one.