I believe there is a lack of ease in bolding and italicizing text other than the current click a button and it'll do it or just manually inputting their corresponding remarkup syntax. I believe that there should be a better and easier way to do such a task.

My solution:
My solution is simple, yet effective. Since I'm typing a task, why not allow bolding and italicizing from the keyboard? I do it all the time, I spend most of my time on the keyboard, so why not boost productivity a bit?

⌘+B = **TEXT HERE**, and if you do it while highlighting something, it should put the bold on the text, for example, if user Foo is making a comment and wants to bold a comment quickly, Foo could highlight over I <3 Forge and click ⌘+B and it would result in **I <3 Forge**.

⌘+I = //TEXT HERE//with the same logic as above except italicized