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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

#391

Post by thundergolfer »

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…

I made a small CLI tool I use at work specifically because their formatting is almost-but-not-quite-Markdown.

Just stick to CommonMark, for god's sake. Atlassian, Slack, take a look at Github's editor experience because it's fantastic compared to yours.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#392

Post by alexis_fr »

labster wrote: post #379
arkh wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Great idea!

It can be sanitized before saving. Many libraries for that.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#393

Post by dmitriid »

carlivar wrote: post #356
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _so badly_ want Jira and Confluence to support just plain old markdown. Their editor is a nightmare; every programmer where I work hates it but all of management seems to love it.

Confluence used to have it. Or a similar syntax at least. They went WYSIWYG around 2010 or so. It was a dark day; I still remember the plaintive cries echoing from engineer cubes (we had whole cubes back then!).

The new Confluence they are rolling out is pretty good at converting Markdown to WYSIWYG on the fly. Not without glitches, of course, but I'm thoroughly impressed.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#394

Post by tomc1985 »

climb_stealth wrote: post #354
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.

I'd say one problem is that toggles make your code more complicated and harder to test. And the more toggles there are the more combinations for potential issues to pop up. As a user I'd prefer to see more toggles, but if I had to maintain a product I'd probably try to make good decisions instead of leaving things open.

I hear this time and time again and it is the biggest fucking cop-out. We write code for all stakeholders, not just for us. A product manager's (or worse, a focus group's) "good decisions" are more-often-than-not lowest-common-denominator drivel that has lead us to the current reality of terrible software -- it's like a tragedy of the commons where everyone acting in their own rational self-interest ends up overfishing the lake and then suddenly the town is facing starvation.

Boo-fucking-hoo, write the extra test case.

I'd be less bitter if I didn't feel this sentiment was almost single-handedly responsible for the death of "options for power users"

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#395

Post by jen20 »

rbavocadotree wrote: post #314
p1necone wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

65 of the fortune 100 companies use slack.

They didn't until after it became popular with startups, however.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#396

Post by new_here »

ss3000 wrote: post #374
Arathorn wrote: post #35

Amusingly, for https://riot.im we just shelved our WYSIWYG editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it's a nightmare to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn't a wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good enough. Our current editor was written from scratch (c…

Curious if you've explored something based on ProseMirror? I've heard good things about it and it seems to have a decent implementation for hybrid WYSIWYG + Markdown. https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/

We used ProseMirror to build our editor at https://able.bio/new

We chose ProseMirror after doing a lot of research (TinyMCE, Slate, Draft, Medium toolbar) and have been very happy with what it’s enabled us to do so far. We’ll probably write a blog post about it at some point.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#397

Post by Nullabillity »

Arathorn wrote: post #35

Amusingly, for https://riot.im we just shelved our WYSIWYG editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it's a nightmare to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn't a wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good enough. Our current editor was written from scratch (c…

It's even sadder because Org-Mode demonstrated how to do WYSIWYG right.

Apply the styling in real time, but then also show the formatting characters around it! That way you lose all of the weird WYSIWYG edge cases (will this character I type at the edge of a bold segment also be bold?), and you also teach WYSIWYG users Markdown in a natural way.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#398

Post by [deleted] »

labster wrote: post #379
arkh wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Great idea!

[deleted]

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#399

Post by alexis_fr »

kelseydh wrote: post #353
bartread wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. Oh my goodness: triggered. I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this. "But, but, we used it at blah company." "Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it." I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, caprici…

Yeah, the very first time I used Confluence I was in shock of how developer's at one time could have thought this was a good or useful product for discussing/planning code changes. For ticketing software, I find Clubhouse to be much better than JIRA. Normal markdown that doesn't drive you insane. Much slicker all around.

Concerning Clubhouse.io, it looks great, is there a download version? I know “Cloud is the way to go”, but I work in Men’s Rights (DV abuses, etc) and it is usually something that cloud companies don’t want on their platform, so we’re constantly at risk of being revoked.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#400

Post by vasco »

pfranz wrote: post #160
exogeny wrote: post #38

I'm going to take the opposite of this argument, and for bonafides, I run the product team for a 1000+ person company. I'm going to assume that this thing was tested out the wazoo, both qualitatively and behind enough feature-flags and buckets to keep Optimizely in business for a year. So I have no doubt that this wasn't just a hunch on their part, but something that they meticulously tracked. If I'm wrong, definitel…

I work with a bunch of non-tech people. I get what they're doing. The techy people are the only ones who bother using ` for anything. I have no idea if non-techies will start now that there's a button for it, but typing it is now really annoying for everyone who has been using it. I kinda reminds me when Confluence added their WYSIWYG editor--or using Frontpage. I basically /had/ to go to code view to get the page to…

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