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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#301

Post by dfsegoat »

xfitm3 wrote: post #210

Fuck slack. They're hostile to user choice and preferences, pushing a one-size-fits all attitude. Communication preferences are extremely personal and must be respected. I have a custom ssl proxy to intercept slack.com and modify their api, eliminating what I believe to be dark patterns. Some things I do: * Force dark mode always * Disable favicon.ico updating when there are notifications in DnD * Group channels base…

I’m just curious about the ssl proxy + api modification part in general - got a ref for that for a more mundane application?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#302

Post by zentiggr »

guessmyname wrote: post #46

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

Argh! Oh, well, bye bye usable Slack, hello full of individual PM review bullet point features unusable frustrating senseless Slack.

Glad my only use is a comms channel for my Ingress group.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#303

Post by olingern »

It’s very annoying how it handles backticks via some sort of autocomplete.

Questions I ask myself about this: - Why is this not an “opt-in” feature? I could see it being useful for people not acquainted with markdown-like syntax

- What PM / UX’er thought this was a great idea? I’m sure there was internal feedback that this was less than ideal

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#304

Post by Myrmornis »

On the plus side, maybe in a future update they'll make it so that we can do ```somelanguage and the box will have JS active with syntax highlighting and tab indentation appropriate for . Slack's thing hasn't seemed that bad to me. It's true I've deleted a few stray back ticks, but it's so easy to edit mistakes it's not that big a deal. Especially if you use both Jira and Slack, the absolute shitness of Jira's issue text entry UI is a different order of magnitude and Slack's input box seems fine.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#305

Post by pbreit »

jdoliner wrote: post #155

I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/ / `, things work normally up until the second " " at which point the "/" between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't…

Your asterisk example works OK for me. As does the blog writer's "when you do `foo()` it foos the bar".

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#306

Post by p1necone »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #288

Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formattin…

Agreed, isn't slack only popular because of "cool" tech startups picking it up initially?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#307

Post by paulddraper »

_asummers wrote: post #292
paulddraper wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to create two adjacent but separate code blocks. ``` one ``` ``` two ``` I've tried and tried.

If you add a blank line between them, then it won't combine them.

I didn't really want an extra blank line between them.

Still...I could have swore I had tried that anyway. Huh.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#308

Post by Seb-C »

social_quotient wrote: post #9

Here is a link for some additional context https://slack.com/help/articles/202288908-format-your-messag... And https://api.slack.com/changelog/2019-09-what-they-see-is-wha...

Another annoying and broken design decision: because I live in Japan the first link redirects me automatically to the Japanese version of the article. There is no option to choose the language, and manually changing the language-code in the URL still redirects me to the Japanese version. My browser is set to English and French as main languages...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#309

Post by shantly »

goostavos wrote: post #281
ajkjk wrote: post #47

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them. I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

I bet a large percentage of Slack people _tried super hard_ to stop that cohort of PMs. However, you can only fight upwards so much before you just check out completely, cash the checks, and halfheartedly build whatever nonsense they're forcing through.

It's really demoralizing to be on a team on which the devs clearly have better design and UX sense than the designer(s) and/or product manager. But not the titles—they're "just" software developers who couldn't possibly understand users or design or common friggin' sense.
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