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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

#363
Same for Teams. Based on what I've heard I thought I will like it but the input box ruined it for me. It's beyond pathetic how a company the size of MS cannot implement a text-box that outputs text how I want it more than 1 in 10 times.

While I agree that non-technical persons would not get Markdown, not a single non-technical person ever messaged me something with markup. So why not just disable the shitty WYSIWYG and make markdown-formatting a opt-in choice from the sender of messages?

Also: Even Azure Dev Ops suffered from the same problem. I have no idea, how the same company can produce VS (Code or full version) and then release junk like this.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#364
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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590153

Really unsure why I was downvoted for this. I posted a link to someone else in this thread that has actually talked to Slack employees, it's directly related to the comment I replied to.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#366

I still maintain that JIRA has the worst WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting support, of any major code platform. It amazes me they are so dominant among developers.

Atlassian products aren’t popular with developers. They’re popular with managers who don’t understand yet need to control developers.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#367

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…

That's exactly what Reddit recently added, when they wanted to become more newcomer-friendly, and I have to say that it works pretty well!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#368
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The WYSIWYG editor on Slack that everyone is hating on is actually Quill-based. And do note that it's always been based on Quill, they just recently added more Blots/Embeds to it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#369

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!"

> it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!

So, markdown?

Every website has its own flavor of it. Just reading some of the answers around here you can read "to do markdown better we made our own markdown".

Maybe because it is shitty. Just let users use HTML.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#370

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing . It's fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms. I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-h…

That import chats from Slack feature is compelling, damn. So Zulip doesn't hide chats over a certain amount like Slack does eh? This could make it extremely useful for cash strapped non-profits.

Zulip's hosted plans for corporate users have a similar model to Slack's -- there's a free plan with limited access to history, and a paid plan with full access to everything.

Since you mentioned nonprofits, we provide free hosting for open source projects and free or highly discounted hosting (e.g. 15% price) for many other nonprofits.

See https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/ for more details.

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