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I've been wishing for this for a long time, but it seems nobody even mentioned this so far.

I'm talking about markdowns or HTML tags for gamepad buttons.

When talking about how to perform certain actions, we sometimes name the buttons that need to be pressed. For PC, we have the <kbd> tag. So for instance:

Press <kbd>F</kbd> to pay respects

renders as:

Press F to pay respects

But we don't really have an equivalent for gamepads.

"Can't we just use the existing tag for gamepads as well?", you might ask.

In most cases we probably can (whether we should is another question), but what about all the related questions?

Do we tell people to press X, O, Square, Triangle? Or Cross, Circle, Square, Triangle?

Do we instead include the respective images, like: Cross, Circle, Square, and Triangle (wikipedia.org)?

Personally, I think using images is not only more visually appealing, but also immediately obvious, unambiguous, and wastes less space on screen. The problem is, writing:

![Cross][https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/PlayStationX.svg]

takes a lot of time. Even when copy-pasting, getting the URL, or finding a previous question/answer that already contains those, takes a lot of time. Imagine how much of it we could save, if we could write [PS:Cross] instead (example). This would also take care of issues that may arise when some people forget to add a description to the image.

Given how widespread and famous the PlayStation brand is (as well as its buttons), I think implementing a few custom markdowns for Arqade wouldn't be wrong.

The problem isn't limited to only the PlayStation, though. The D-Pad is also an integral part of consoles. While writing: "D-Pad right" may be simple enough, there's no guarantee everyone would know what a "D-Pad" is. Showing D-Pad right (gaming.wikia.com) instead would be clear, even to them.

Let's also not forget the buttons hiding beneath the analog sticks. In PlayStation speech, they're called L3 and R3. But unlike the L1, L2, R1, and R2 buttons, which are labelled as such on the controller itself, L3 and R3 have no such label. I'm also not aware of any convention on how to name those buttons on Nintendo consoles or the Xbox. Simply writing "R3" might not be clear for everyone, hence images would be helpful here too.

I'm not saying we need an equivalent for each console. I'm sure Nintendo or Xbox related questions and answers can do well enough with A, B, X, Y or ABXY. But having images for the buttons mentioned above would be a tremendous help in my opinion.

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  • Also: mouse buttons. <kbd>Right-click</kbd> looks weird.
    – Joachim
    Nov 17, 2019 at 14:59
  • 1
    Alt codes solve the lettering problem for PS & D-pad issues (▲▼►◄ x o □ △) , but I agree it would be nice to have a way to insert proper gamepad 'buttons'.
    – Robotnik Mod
    Nov 17, 2019 at 22:22
  • Any idea of how such a feature could be implemented? Is it a waiting game at this point?
    – Joachim
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:04
  • I have honestly no idea how anything gets implemented on this site. Maybe it needs more upvotes?
    – Nolonar
    Nov 25, 2019 at 21:32

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