Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#381

Post by enigmo » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:34 AM UTC

master-litty wrote: post #312

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.

Oh man, Lync. The re-skin of MSN Messenger that nobody wanted. I remember when I couldn't change my status from "Away" for some reason. On my computer it would always show me as "Online," but to everyone else I had been away for 300+ days.

from what I recall (knew some folks on both teams) there was zero shared code. always thought Messenger was the better implementation.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#382

Post by teekert » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

I feel the same about the new Nextcloud MD editor, it's great, until you make a formatting mistake or want to correct formatting. As a rule these auto-md-renderers should come with a plain text editing mode.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#383

Post by sean0- » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

I just received this from Slack support and want to table flip.

> I'm afraid there isn't a way to revert to the old formatting method. We don't currently have plans to make the new formatting configurable though we are carefully considering all our customers' feedback.

I think I'd rather have Clippy shoved in my face.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#384

Post by lilyball » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:39 AM UTC

What Slack really should do is have a WYSIWYG editor that keeps the markdown syntax. Just apply rich text formatting to the markdown syntax, but otherwise leave the text alone. This will provide a nice reminder about what the syntax does (I always forget that Slack treats asterisks differently than markdown) but let me edit using all of the muscle memory that I've built over the years.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#385

Post by ako » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:39 AM UTC

shantly wrote: post #309

goostavos wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they have statistics that indicate that their larges user group by now isn't capable of using markdown? Most non-techies are not aware of markdown.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#386

Post by pgt » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

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…

Never put your customers back in a buying position! Learned this from @dhh. Especially when the minority rule applies to them.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#387

Post by novok » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

aero142 wrote: post #250

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 would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers . We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers . Markdown may seem…

TBH, for documentation outside of docstrings and READMEs WYSIWYG editors (usually google docs) are the most popular form of documentation for engineers. I've seen this happen naturally at a bunch of corps unless someone made a coherent documentation policy and enforced it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#388

Post by usr1106 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

nicwolff wrote: post #320

imglorp wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach it. It seems every text input box across the product line has a different input method: BB, Jira, and Confluence. You'd think they might standardize with one to be less user hostile.

Jira still has two different WYSIWYG implementations on different pages. On the "classic" issue form, you still enter `{code}this is code{code}`, but if you open that issue in the sidebar of the backlog page, it's Markdown.

Luckily I don't have.to use it anymore. It's 2+ years, but my memory wants to tell me that I hated it, because Confluence worked differently than JIRA.

We are using Gitlab now. It's much more limited than JIRA, but for what it does much more coder friendly.

On the topic of the text box, gitlab saves the content if I start typing, get distracted, go somewhere else and come back later. That's handy. Unfortunately there is some inconsistency that it doesn't work everwhere, was it so that in Wiki pages it didn't work?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#389

Post by Exuma » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #260

ben_jones wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I've been developing an internal CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But while it is somewhat depressing, I'm left with questions about how bad it really is. First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary (let's assume the ultimate products are better then the linux/vim/emacs they are superse…

Survivorship bias. What happened to Digg? Myspace? UI isn't the only reason, but it's definitely a contributing factor in their demise. The eBay story about changing the color of the banner should be followed for new features as well.

what happened with ebay color

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#390

Post by flukus » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

thelittleone wrote: post #335

rbavocadotree wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

65 of the fortune 100 companies use slack.

I’m always a little wary about these claims. For example I worked at a Fortune 500 before and I created a setup on an app like Slack using my corporate email account. There is a big difference between “used by company Y” and “used by tiny team X inside company Y” (probably without IT approval).

Agreed, just saying x is used at y is meaningless, especially when that company is a multi headed hydra like google or MS. I see it so often with languages these days but I'm pretty sure you could find a team in a huge company like MS programming in TCL all day.

You can prove anything with case studies.