Formatting Text in Basecamp

I’ve tested a lot of web-based project management applications including No Kahuna, GoPlan, Lighthouse, and ActiveCollab to name a few of the better ones. I really wanted to like one of those better than Basecamp, but the truth is Basecamp really is the cadillac of project management apps.

I’m not going to go into a long spiel about why, but I will highlight one of the subtler features that is one of the many little things that make it a pleasure to use: Textile

UPDATE: 37signals has added new text formatting to Basecamp since this post was written. It disables Textile by default! Fortunately you can still use Textile by clicking “switch to Textile/HTML.”

With Textile you can easily add some basic formatting with minimal effort. No HTML tags required. Some of the most easy to use and beneficial formatting includes bold, italic, lists, quoted text, headings, and links.

For example:

h2. Heading level two
 
* this 
* becomes
* a bulleted  list
 
h3. Heading level three
 
# this
# becomes 
# a numbered  list
 
You can easily make *bold text*  and _italic text_ like so.
 
bq. Quoted text is also easy.
 
Here is some "hyperlinked text":http://google.com/

Will become the following (screenshot from Basecamp):

NOTE: The “preview” button is a good way to check your formatting before you post.