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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

#621

Post by dd82 »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #612
tiborsaas wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are different. For me it's exactly the "oh you changed it, never mind, I'll use it a bit differently from now on" situation.

Same here. I've already mostly adapted to the new editor. There's some annoyances, but I love not having to send to myself just to see what the message will look like and how Slack's version of Markdown will interpret my formatting.

I wouldn't have a problem with this _if_ this were configurable. Its not. This is two pretty good UI/UX screwups in a row by Slack (this, and threads)

Slack's good at engineering and development. They used to be good at UI/UX, but whoever over there in the text entry product design slot is having a case of the Jony Ives.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#622

Post by Tade0 »

ryankshaw wrote: post #336
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.

what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor for a large website

I'm obviously biased and would probably recommend what I was working on(CKEditor), but here are some observations regarding the various propositions:

CKEditor 4 excels in two things:

-Handling selection - especially tables.

-Editing for accessibility.

I would recommend v5 though, otherwise you'd be potentially giving my one good friend, who's already very busy maintaining v4, even more work. :D

https://textbox.io/ - these guys gave us a run for our money a few years ago with their paste-from-external-source (e.g. Word) capabilities, but I believe they've been since acquired by Tiny.

https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce - I think this one is slowly being cannibalized by TextBox. I remember them receiving a lot of funding at one point, but getting nowhere with it.

Froala - avoid. It's not really open-source, and judging how support for paying customers works you're not getting your money's worth.

Quill - we've never seen them as a threat, so maybe they're not that good? Especially given that Slack thing that's currently unfolding.

Edit: Formatting.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#623

Post by obituary_latte »

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…

Frustrating to get such a definitive “not going to change it” response like that. At least with a company like Google they wouldn’t even bother responding. Why even bother offering to accept feedback if they’re not willing to take it to heart? Maybe it’s just an attempt to placate their users. I don’t see why they would have an issue offering some type of preference setting or inline selection for this. What would be the harm in allowing users to so choose?

Seems like it’s becoming another dark pattern whereby developers are forcing their decisions on users a la Chrome not allowing developers to disable the browsers built-in autofill.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#624

Post by lucideer »

bishalb wrote: post #608
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!

While I understand why this change can be annoying to the tech savvy folks of hackernews, it can be quite helpful for those who aren't that tech savvy and want easy ways to bold, italicize texts (that make up majority of the slack user base). Heck I am sure most of the slack users wouldn't even know it was possible to bold, italicize on slack using markdown.

Why does anyone (tech savvy or otherwise) need to bold or italicize anything.

In my mind bolding/italicizing are nice-to-haves alongside emoji. You wouldn't compromise the entire functional user experience of the central feature of your app for nicer emojis. (at least I hope not).

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#626

Post by dd82 »

Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…

Sure, but at least have this a configurable option.

Right now, they just basically blew away something that worked really well for alot of people and are demanding their captive audience adjust.

Whoever at Slack pushed this and threads has a good case of the Jony Ives going on. Thats two UI/UX changes that have met with lukewarm reactions to absolute dislike.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#627

Post by mipmap04 »

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.

At this point, I like Azure Dev Ops more than the Atlassian suite.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#628

Post by dijit »

e12e wrote: post #576
dijit wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using wee_slack.py for some time; if you can add an application token and prefer the weechat UI then it's an appreciable option, but the issues I've had regarding inputting code are not necessarily fixed there since weechat doesn't take multi-line input. :(

Sure it does: /edit (opens $EDITOR, in my case neovim). Link to wee-slack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

TIL, that's amazing! :D

EDIT: Turns out, I spoke too soon, there is no such option according to docs or from reading the code, maybe you have another plugin doing this?

EDIT2: found it: https://github.com/keith/edit-weechat

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#629

Post by obituary_latte »

aashcan wrote: post #558
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.

Just wrote in, Thanks for sharing your experience with our new formatting UI. I'm sorry to hear it's been a little disruptive so far. There isn't a way to revert to the old formatting method, I'm afraid. We don't currently have plans to make the new formatting configurable though we are carefully considering all our customers' feedback.

For mobile users:

>Thanks for sharing your experience with our new formatting UI. I'm sorry to hear it's been a little disruptive so far. There isn't a way to revert to the old formatting method, I'm afraid. We don't currently have plans to make the new formatting configurable though we are carefully considering all our customers' feedback.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#630

Post by bishalb »

lucideer wrote: post #624
bishalb wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand why this change can be annoying to the tech savvy folks of hackernews, it can be quite helpful for those who aren't that tech savvy and want easy ways to bold, italicize texts (that make up majority of the slack user base). Heck I am sure most of the slack users wouldn't even know it was possible to bold, italicize on slack using markdown.

Why does anyone (tech savvy or otherwise) need to bold or italicize anything. In my mind bolding/italicizing are nice-to-haves alongside emoji. You wouldn't compromise the entire functional user experience of the central feature of your app for nicer emojis. (at least I hope not).

I myself use them sometimes to emphasize certain parts of the message. They can be very helpful. Many people like bolding certain words in an email as well to emphasize them.
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