I found out typing <math brings up the math mode editor, but this is not obvious and it would be nice to have a simple button.
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Replying/Flow
That comes back to a usability issue i guess. To express all the wikitext with buttons, you would end up with a reply window with 50 buttons... compare this to how many people actually write math in a reply and i'm not sure that is worth it...
I guess it's true that if you're writing math in the talk pages you probably already know about math tag
I guess my initial idea for a hints panel is off the table, but if there was one it would be a great place to list these magic sequences. I didn’t know about <math, but had discovered <ref (not all of them are extension tags, e.g. [[ ).
On the other hand, if you’re going to have a pop-up hints panel, might you just as well have a pop-up Insert menu? The difference is that menu items need to be big enough to be tappable.
If the former (hints text), you could compactly write, “Specials: [[, <ref, <math, ...”
Note that the sequences also work in Mobile VE where the corresponding menus are similarly omitted, but the fact seems not widely known nor well-documented.
FYI, there is a "hints panel" accessible by pressing Ctrl+? (or Ctrl+/, depending on your keyboard layout). It is a bit ironic that you need to know this keyboard shortcut to learn about other keyboard shortcuts ;) In normal VE, you can also access it from the interface by clicking the question mark ("Help") next to the publish button, and then "Keyboard shortcuts".
Cool, I don't have a Ctrl key on iOS touchscreen keyboard, but that would be handy for some other platforms.
I tried Ctrl+/ this morning (on Windows) because I was trying to demote a bullet to a lower level. (And had problems where the Keyboard Shortcuts box rendered with a title bar but no content. But reloading the page seemed to fix that.)
Though listed on the Keyboard Shortcuts panel, neither Tab nor Ctrl+] seemed to work for me in Reply Tool's Visual mode. ... but I just now found phab:T285123 "Add support for indenting/outdenting shortcuts to discussion tools" – so I won't file a duplicate request. ;)