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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

#341

Post by greggman2 »

time0ut wrote: post #283
beatgammit wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I want is consistent syntax for links, italics, and bulleted lists, bonus points for numbered lists, bold, and code blocks. I don't want to have to click stuff when typing, and I don't want to remember keyboard shortcuts with subtle differences between different services. Markdown is good enough, yet for some reason, each platform finds it necessary to do something slightly differently. I really don't care about…

That plus a nice table syntax. So many times I need to put a table in a jira comment or chat, but not often enough to remember how for the particular context.

markdown allows arbitrary html. just paste in . At least in my experience all table format miss something that makes my tables illegable

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#342

Post by shijie »

ryankshaw wrote: post #336
Tade0 wrote: post #45

As someone who used to be part of a team developing one of the most popular in-browser WYSIWYG editors: 1. Browser WYSIWYGs are really hard to make. 2. All browser WYSIWYGs are terrible. Avoid rolling your own WYSIWYG if you can. Even if you have a team of 1500 people at your disposal.

what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor for a large website

Recently integrated Quill into our app and it is fantastic — as fantastic as a WYSIWYG editor can be, I suppose. It produces valid, sensical HTML as the output, in case you need to take the result and use it in email templates (which was our use case). Highly recommend.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#343

Post by adrianmonk »

rdhatt wrote: post #48

You can submit feedback to Slack using "/feedback" command. The nice thing it appears they have real people give you real replies. I encourage people to use it. I asked them for the option to turn it off. An excerpt from their response. > ... we understand that this has caused a disruption in workflows for some of our more technical users. While we don't have any active plans to make this configurable at the moment,…

There are definitely several things that I don't like about Slack, but their support has been very responsive. I've reported at least two issues, and they have always taken my input seriously.

A while back, I reported a bug with copy/paste, and they asked questions, acknowledged it, and had it fixed by the next release.

More recently, I had a question about why the UI behaves in a certain way I didn't expect, and they took the time to explain that it was intentional, and what their reasoning was for doing it their way instead of how I expected.

All of these experiences are way better than average for our industry, which in my experience usually just brushes you off without trying to understand your issue and tries to placate you with a non-answer or answer to something other than what you asked.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#344

Post by nitrogen »

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…

If you reintroduce Markdown mode now using CommonMark, programmers will just be happy that they can use Slack effectively again and as a bonus, you’ll match GitHub and everywhere else programmers hang out.

Please please do, Slack. I filed a support request already asking how to turn off the new editor.

While we're at it, let's have syntax highlighting of inline non-snippet code blocks.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#345

Post by hunter2_ »

cwilkes wrote: post #296
hunter2_ wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy people around me most often, but even when I don't, I've never heard someone complain about excess toggles. Ever. Is this a thing people do? I hear orders of magnitude more complaints about lack of toggles.

Most of the time toggles are done poorly in that I can’t tell if they are on or off. There’s no consensus on if that is left or right. Or lit up or darkened. It is maddening. In my opinion the right way to do toggles is to have area below it that is either enabled / expanded for On or grayed out / collapsed for Off. That way I can also read what the toggle implies. I suppose that can be done in mouse over if there ar…

Oops, I didn't mean to imply a particular interface widget. Should have said "setting" (not necessarily binary, either).

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#346

Post by cecilpl2 »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #89
LilBytes wrote: post #57

The specific example shown in the attached article works fine for me in Slack with the updated editor. ``` when you do `foo()` it foos the bar. ``` Looks fine for me? Only the `foo()` is highlighted, not the entire line as shown. Have they pushed out a fix for this already?

That example worked fine for me, the second example (a variation on the first) worked as the article described. Once foo() was "code", I couldn't update it (at least I couldn't discover how to do so outside of killing that bit). I'd bet the first example didn't work at some point, and then was quickly patched.

The second example worked correctly seamlessly for me as well. I can easily edit text inside a code block in the WYSIWYG editor. Maybe they just patched that too?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#347

Post by egeozcan »

vailripper wrote: post #99
nerdponx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what else has a terrible WYSIWYG editor? Microsoft Teams. It's kind of sort of like Markdown, except when it isn't, or when it breaks. At least it's a step up from Lync.

Sounds like Atlassians approach with Jira - "it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!"

Not to even mention the annoying one-click-to-edit fields that lose your scroll position in the ticket and you cannot escape away. I'm furious every time this happens.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#348

Post by kelseydh »

I long for the day I can just write reformatted code in Markdown, GitHub style -- with three backticks and a language declaration --- and Slack syntax highlights the colours correctly within chats.

This is such an obvious improvement for developers who share code constantly via Slack.

In fact, such an improvement, I would seriously switch chat apps to get it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#349

Post by cecilpl2 »

sincerely wrote: post #72
LilBytes wrote: post #57

The specific example shown in the attached article works fine for me in Slack with the updated editor. ``` when you do `foo()` it foos the bar. ``` Looks fine for me? Only the `foo()` is highlighted, not the entire line as shown. Have they pushed out a fix for this already?

According to the Slack twitter, yes ( https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1192199216157868037 )

That tweet was posted Nov 6, this blog post was posted today.

FWIW I'm unable to reproduce both examples in the blog post - they work correctly for me in my Slack web interface.

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