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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

#511

Post by jeltz »

hazz99 wrote: post #171
ghostcluster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg red…

> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase…

> Something like 50% of Reddit users are on mobile, for which the redesign is targeted (I believe)

The re-design just launched on mobile last week, while it has been on desktop for a very long time, so it is way too early to say what mobile users think. Personally I think that it is even worse on mobile.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#512

Post by ako »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #470
ako wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.

Excel is the tool used most widely by paying customer non-techies. Excel also happens to be the software with the most arcane UI on Earth. 'Making sense' is not the issue here, motivation is. And I don't think removing a power-user feature and replacing it with something half-baked will motivate your user base. P.S. WhatsApp uses a markdown-like UI for formatting: https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000002/ Somehow…

Interesting , wasn’t aware of the markdown support in WhatsApp.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#513

Post by ajscanlan »

jackweirdy wrote: post #473
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.

The flow of pasting such strings is not great either. Previously you could paste a string with backticks and it would be formatted correctly on send. Now the behaviour is to ask you every time to apply formatting. There is an option for "don't ask again" which I tried assuming it would make autoformatting the default, but it turns off the behaviour completely with no way to get it back!

`CMD + Shift + F` applies formatting.

Unfortunately it must be done every time, no autoformatting by default it seems.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#514

Post by TeMPOraL »

freedomben wrote: post #188
duderific wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's probably not bad feature for a lot of people. But for goodness sake, why not make it optional?

This is exactly why I hate it. I think for the average person it's probably great, but it should be easy to disable for those who don't want it.

Or those who grow past it. Power users are not a different species, they do not come from the planet Vulcan. They get created through repeated use of software in order to solve problems.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#515

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Agreed. Part of me wishes you could just embed MS Word in a webpage if you really need WYSIWYG. Similarity to Word is the reason people want it in the first place.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#516

Post by gridlockd »

himynameistimli wrote: post #368
shijie wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People dont want better WYSIWYG though, they just want to turn it off.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#517

Post by TeMPOraL »

Doxin wrote: post #462
city41 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The draft feature positively boggles my mind. The intention seems to be to collect all your drafts into one location. But that comes with the assumption people will have multiple drafts for ... chat channels? Do people really work that way? If the actual intention is to remind you you have a half written message, seems some kind of indicator on the channel would suffice. Having my channel “disappear” on me is maddeni…

I can't imagine anyone who has a job that doesn't consist mostly of talking to people doing that. But people with manager or sales-type jobs? I bet they could really love this feature. Start typing your message, discover you're missing info, task someone with finding that info. get back to the message whenever. Still though, making it break the sort should really be a setting. Or even better, just show people twice i…

> Or even better, just show people twice if there's a draft open.

Exactly. There's no rule that says user interfaces have to be in 3rd normal form. You could just leave a visible indicator next to the channel name, and have a separate page/tab with list of all unfinished messages.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#518

Post by TeMPOraL »

nh2 wrote: post #196
StavrosK wrote: post #39

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…

What's keeping me on Slack instead of Zulip is its inability to mark messages as unread [1] (Alt+Click on Slack). I think that's critical for a communication app when you want to ensure that you've answered all things that need answering. [1] https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/2676

That's one thing I'm currently missing in Ripcord (the Slack client). Or at least I haven't figured out how to do it. I use Slack from three devices, and sometimes I read a message I want to reply to later from a different device - marking messages as unread was a handy way for ensuring I don't lose them.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#519

Post by jakub_g »

A frequent flow that broke for me:

- paste some code

- go to the top and add ```

- go to the bottom and add ```

Now to make this work you have to

- add ```

- only then paste the code

It's a "first world problem" but many small issues like this make stuff annoying as hell

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#520

Post by OJFord »

I was mad reading this this morning, but now that I have (Electron app, macOS) Slack open and try it - it's fine. I'd be fine without it, but I don't need to tap arrow after closing a `` code block, and I can click or arrow back into it and insert new code at the beginning/middle/end no problem.

I didn't need it, but it's not broken (any more?) as described and as I feared reading earlier.

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