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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

#541

Post by Sholmesy »

josteink wrote: post #521
sambe wrote: post #495

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!

> I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice As someone who never got into slack, and never found it appealing... How so?

If it is the primary method of communicating within your team/company, then you will find it difficult to not use it, or rather you will be left out of major decisions/changes.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#542

Post by arethuza »

huckyaus wrote: post #487
Roark66 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. You're probably ri…

>MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync) Teams, not Skype for Business, is Microsoft's Slack competitor.

Not sure why you were being voted down - Teams was explicitly positioned as a competitor for Slack.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#543

Post by rerx »

pbreit wrote: post #305
jdoliner wrote: post #155

I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/ / `, things work normally up until the second " " at which point the "/" between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't…

Your asterisk example works OK for me. As does the blog writer's "when you do `foo()` it foos the bar".

I could not reproduce the example issues from the blog post, but the dual asterices inside the back ticks still fail for me.

The upside is that it's now possible to have bold passages in monospaced text. I missed that before.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#544

Post by _pmf_ »

bartread wrote: post #339
tbabb wrote: post #111

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…

> 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…

> I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this.

It's worse than literally every other wiki I've ever used; even worse than phpBB.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#545

Post by gizzlon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #503
sambe wrote: post #495

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!

Exactly. Personally, I recommend switching to Ripcord as a Slack client. That's what I did some time ago, and I couldn't be happier.

thanks, looks great!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#546

Post by estomagordo »

janwh wrote: post #493

I want to encourage everyone who doesn't like the WYSIWYG input box to use `/feedback` directly from within Slack to let the folks over there know about it. I believe this is one of those occasions in which tons of user feedback is crucial to at least make that awful thing optional.

Never knew this existed. Thank you.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#547

Post by bloak »

Unusable input boxes are rather common nowadays. I know several web sites for which I know from experience I should edit my text somewhere else and then paste it in, then delete and repaste if I need to change anything.

In general, I've never met a WYSIWYG system that I've found satisfactory. Admittedly, I do have a rather low anger threshold for stray invisible formatting.

At an even higher level of generality, isn't it a bit sad that we still don't have a good way of handling text on computers, something that lets you portably handle typographic emphasis but doesn't allow stray double spaces and crap like that?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#548

Post by feanaro »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #452
Arathorn wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://modular.im gives a turnkey hosting solution for Riot/Matrix for what it’s worth. Riot should be lighter weight than Slack, but launch (particularly if you haven’t used it in ages) can be slow, plus we’re chasing a startup perf regression on firefox atm. The main reason Riot’s better is that you can use your own server, participate in an open network, and have control over the software if some feature gets pus…

Coolio on both! I think the messaging on modular.im could be a lot better, IMO. I don't know what the relations between all the different organisations/people are here, but having all of "Matrix", "Riot", "Modular" is just confusing branding/marketing. It would be much better to have just "Matrix protocol", "Matrix self-hosted", and "Matrix hosted", for example. Right now, it's not even immediately clear that hosted…

It's true this is how a typical centralized commercial solution would be marketed. However, it's a bit trickier for Matrix since it's an open protocol with a neutral governing foundation and many client implementations.

Although New Vector (the company behind Modular) is currently driving most of the development of Matrix and Riot (the first and reference client), matrix.org itself is supposed to be a neutral network-related site. Notice the remark that it's controlled by the Matrix Foundation at the bottom of the page, and not New Vector.

That said, Riot does have a reference to Modular, but it's buried here: https://about.riot.im/free. I'd personally be fine with it being displayed somewhere more prominently (or at least under a more intuitive section name than "Free!"). I also think it would also be a good idea if the Riot page mentioned Matrix (or the Matrix logo) somewhere above the fold.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#550

Post by viraptor »

darkcl wrote: post #528

I have contacted them, and they replied me with this Lucas (Slack) Nov 20, 9:15 PM PST Hi there, Thank you for taking the time to write in and provide this feedback. I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all…

There's always alternative clients. Ripcord ( https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ ) is not 100% there yet, but it's definitely usable, tiny, and gets out of the way.
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