Building Pika Out LoudModify

There’s already multiple ways to format your posts in Pika’s editor: clicking the toolbar, using a keyboard shortcut, writing in markdown. Today, we’re introducing yet another way: “/slash” commands.

Just type “/” (forward slash) and you’ll get a dropdown of Pika formatting options. You can navigate through the list with arrow keys and select, as well as continue typing to narrow down the list.

We hope every blogger can find the formatting option(s) they prefer here at Pika!

Update: An earlier version of this post suggested slash commands would only work at the beginning of a paragraph and only support block-level formats. That is no longer the case! Feel free to type /link in the middle of your sentences.

When we set out to build Pika, our north star was to create the best place to write your thoughts on the web. That means a great writing editor first, both in terms of features and design. We aim to create a blogging platform that makes you want to write, and we’re continually working towards that goal.

For those of you who write long-form, today we’re introducing two new features to Pika’s editor that you’ll typically find in other great writing software:

• Focus mode highlights where your text caret is while you’re typing. You can choose to focus the line, the sentence, or the paragraph you’re in.

• Typewriter mode keeps your text caret always in the very center of the viewport, even as you create new lines.

You’ll find these options at the bottom of the editor toolbar’s ••• “More” menu:

Together, these two tools can really elevate your writing habits and ability to get words to page. We hope you find them useful!

Sometimes you want to play around with the color themes on your Pika blog, but you’re a little nervous to lose track of your existing custom color settings. Now you can save up to three color themes, making it easy to swap between them before deciding which one you want to make permanent.

Oh, and there’s one more thing: color theme shuffle! Check it out:

We’re excited to have this new quality-of-life improvement for our own blogs, and we hope this update will be useful to you as well!

Hot on the heels of wide images is the ability to resize images, and float them around your content. Here’s what that looks like:

Like “Widen” these new image layout features are only available for single image attachments, not galleries. We’re curious to see how you use them in your Pika posts and pages!

We recently added Tables functionality to Pika. Depending on the content and number of columns, some tables need a bit extra breathing room, so we included a wide option. Today, we’re bringing that same wide option to images, because some things just look better bigger!

Widening an image will bust it out of the typical width of your post, like this:

You can find this “Widen” option in the toolbar for an image attachment. At the moment this is only available to single image attachments, not galleries.

We’ve really enjoyed seeing Pika used for both quick daily photographs as well as long-form photography essays. We look forward to seeing how this new option transforms your photos and posts!

We’re proud and quite fond of the default hypertext-focused design language of Pika blogs, but sometimes an icon just feels right (and it may help your readers). Now you can opt to use an icon instead of text when adding an external link to your navigation:

You can see what this looks like in the navigation of this very blog. 👆

The initial list of supported icons for this was built from the links Pika peeps are already linking to: social media like Mastodon and Bluesky, portfolio websites for photography and video, and a select few others options that make sense.

Additionally, we’ve made the “Add link” option easier to find (it was a bit tucked away before) and you’ll also see a search icon if you add your Site Search page to your navigation.