[New Feature] Support for Footnotes!

Thank you! I've looked forward to this for a long time. 

I don't see how to add footnotes in comments via the LW Docs editor, is that not supported?

It would be a slight exaggeration to say that this is the best day of my life. Only a slight one though. Thanks for the great work!

Awesome, I really think this feature will improve the quality of discussion here as it makes it much easier to note any caveats without having to break the flow of your writing. And I've always been too lazy to switch to markdown just to get footnotes working.

These are great - I’m writing a very long citation-heavy post right now and this feature arrived just in time! And the automatic renumbering already probably saved me an hour.

Having added them, though, they feel a bit big and heavy. I find my eye catching on them as I read, and my internal reading voice pausing when I arrive at them. My current solution is relegating the location of each footnote marker to the end of the sentence, which avoids the hitching but can be confusing: am I saying the whole sentence has a citation, or just the link in the sentence?

I’m currently reading this year’s physical essay collection, and they use a footnote style without brackets, and located at the bottom corner of the text instead of top corner (subscript instead of superscript). My eyes find this style less disruptive - the lack of brackets is probably the biggest part of that, with the sub-instead-of-super a smaller part. I would prefer this style on the site as well. Thought I’d mention it as something to consider - though it could be just a me thing. Either way they are great and thank you!!

This post [LW · GW] had a long footnote (#3) and I tried to middle click the footnote to scroll down, which made the hover preview disappear. I think it would be nice if it didn't.

Thanks for doing this! I just learned that the EA forum uses the same framework under the hood as LW, is it open source? if yes, how can I spin up my own version of this?

This is excellent, thank you! I don't know of a solution to this problem, but FWIW it seems that webclippers somewhat break on these -- e.g. (1) Instapaper doesn't show the footnote number in the body of the text, only the footnote text at the end of the post; (2) Pocket shows the footnote number in the body of the text, but no where shows the footnote text itself.

Thanks again!

Nested footnotes reminds me of an xkcd comic. 

https://xkcd.com/1208/

↑ comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2022-01-04T10:00:15.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I first saw the nested footnote in Expert C Programming

Awesome! I'd be happy to see old posts with footnotes edited to use the new format, either by the authors themselves or by admins.

Is this for posts, comments or both? ^1 

1. ^ Testing in markdown editor. ^2
2. ^ Didn't seem to work. Switched to Draft-JS. ^3
3. Nor in LessWrong Docs [Beta].

This would be a footnote reference.[^2]

[^2]: And here we would define the footnote.

It is really annoying that if you use footnotes from the LW Docs Editor, and then switches to the Markdown editor, the footnotes get irrevertably messed up like this^{[[1]](#fnhqkg4lye79s)}

1. ^{**[^](#fnrefhqkg4lye79s)**}

   this is an example footnote

I noticed that footnotes don't seem to come over when I copy-paste from Google Docs (where I originally wrote the post), hence I have to put them in individually (using the LW Docs editor). Is there a way of just importing them? Or is the best workflow to just write the post in LW Docs?

What about adding support for something like this (footnotes and just notes? on the sides)?

I never realized how much wasted space there is.

Can I write a^[1]

(Yes, but I have to indent the subsequent lines by four spaces)

Thanks for the new feature. Minor bug report here: The footnote marker seems to be followed by a non-breaking space, such that it can interfere with normal paragraph formatting. See the bullet point that begins "correlates suggestively with virtues like altruism" on this page [? · GW].

This is excellent, thanks!

I see a minor bug with the hover view, e.g. in the second footnote of this post [LW · GW] -- perhaps it has something to do with the whole footnote content being a hyperlink?