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The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

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Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#111

Post by jerrysievert »

Jamwinner wrote: post #81
danShumway wrote: post #79

This is a good reminder that sometimes complaining about companies on social media like Hackernews and Twitter does actually help. Not always, maybe not even usually. But Slack went from, "no, we have no plans to adjust this", to "yes, we'll include a toggle", and the reason was that a bunch of people publicly complained and wrote a bunch of messages to support. It is a very, very, very small victory, and if I was go…

Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?

i complained via the builtin "/feedback" mechanism, and received an email from support fairly quickly, then followups for two days.

i wasn't happy with the script that they were required to use, but at least it was better than any twitter-based support i've received, well, except alaska airlines which has (had?) amazing twitter support.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#112

Post by swader999 »

zamalek wrote: post #95
tasuki wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.

The reason is that content editable is a gaping hole in the HTML5 spec, at least last time I checked, there are tons of undefined undefined behaviors (not a typo) where vendors have to choose what they want to do and where developers have no idea that the behavior does not exist in a specification. My very wise coworker made every effort to avoid that minefield. I thought he was wrong for many years, but I have been…

I always thought the entire cms space, the idea that non coders could manage web content, was a non starter just because of the editors.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#113

Post by wildmusings »

The iOS client regularly loses large swaths of messages, with no clue that they’re missing except a time gap. The only way to fix it is to log out and log back in. I imagine a large percent of users are just oblivious to the missing messages. Me and others have been hitting this bug for at least a year at this point, probably much longer. Is anyone at Slack aware of this? Missing messages should be a priority 1 bug for a tool advertised as a replacement for business email.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#114

Post by swader999 »

KORraN wrote: post #26
ripley12 wrote: post #5

The ability to format markup with keyboard shortcuts seems to be gone now. Previously you could select some text, type ctrl-i, and it would add the necessary markup to make the selected text italic. Same for bold text etc. Still, I'll take it over the WYSIWYG editor which was a nightmare for code snippets.

You're right, after disabling WYSIWYG editor keyboard shortcuts don't work. That means I'm staying with extension for Firefox...

Judas priest this blows monkey goats.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#115

Post by leeoniya »

zamalek wrote: post #95
tasuki wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.

The reason is that content editable is a gaping hole in the HTML5 spec, at least last time I checked, there are tons of undefined undefined behaviors (not a typo) where vendors have to choose what they want to do and where developers have no idea that the behavior does not exist in a specification. My very wise coworker made every effort to avoid that minefield. I thought he was wrong for many years, but I have been…

but it's good enough these days to serve as the basis for the CodeMirror 6 rewrite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859291

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#116

Post by brown9-2 »

atombender wrote: post #69
coryfklein wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a culturally enforced strict rule of moving literally ALL new conversations into a subthread and I absolutely LOVE it. This means that if you want to respond to a comment, you never do it in the channel but in the subthread of _that_ comment. This means that when you browse the channel itself, each individual line represents a conversation on a specific topic. You can essentially browse the "headlines" of the…

We do this, too, but I really dislike the thread UX. Threads should behave like nested channels. Today, that works okay if you click on the "5 replies" link under a message, though it opens up a cramped sidebar instead of taking you to something that feels "nested". But when there are multiple threads, the only way to juggle them is that "Threads" entry in the man sidebar. It leads to a weird page that doesn't behave…

Having multiple conversations at the same time in threads is really painful.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#117

Post by brown9-2 »

munk-a wrote: post #83
nitrogen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to provide a counterpoint, threads are very useful for channels with hundreds of members, so that anyone can ask a question but the responses don't make other questions invisible. In that case, the lack of threads would hide important information.

Is this in the context of a public slack? For our internal slack I'd strongly question why questions needed to be raised in a channel with so many people - at my office we have two channels that most people are in, a #general for company announcement and releases and #random. Otherwise I think dedicated team interaction channels are the biggest of ours and we try and keep those pretty small still.

For an internal Slack with thousands of users across many locations it can be pretty common to have channels with hundreds of people in it.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#118

Post by mattnguyen »

slimsag wrote: post #106
coryfklein wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a culturally enforced strict rule of moving literally ALL new conversations into a subthread and I absolutely LOVE it. This means that if you want to respond to a comment, you never do it in the channel but in the subthread of _that_ comment. This means that when you browse the channel itself, each individual line represents a conversation on a specific topic. You can essentially browse the "headlines" of the…

You would love https://zulipchat.com/ (I have no association with them, their threading model is amazing though)

As an aside, they received an NSF grant for their threading UX.

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1722461&His...

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#119

Post by saltcured »

nitrogen wrote: post #53
beatgammit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's not just me. Threads are terrible and hide potentially important information.

Just to provide a counterpoint, threads are very useful for channels with hundreds of members, so that anyone can ask a question but the responses don't make other questions invisible. In that case, the lack of threads would hide important information.

In that situation, I think I would go insane, or resign to preserve my sanity!

Our slack channels have at most a dozen active members and my channel list has approximately a dozen channels with permutations of the same dozen people organized topically. I have turned off almost all notifications as they are so ridiculous and look at the sidebar once in a while to see which channels are active.

I consider slack content ephemeral, even if slack disagrees. If I want to track issues, I use an issue tracker. If I want a threaded conversation, I'd probably write an email still. If I want to find content, I search a wiki or an email archive.

My preference for threads is as appears in my old school mail client or my fading memories of the "trn" threaded news reader for usenet. Threads do not hide messages, they only reorder them into a hierarchical index. It is easy to move back up the index to skim prior content in the tree, but it is also trivial to press a key and jump to the next unread message sorted first by thread and next by message time (to break ties or decide which thread to visit next after exhausting one).

Recently I had the absurd situation of someone using threaded replies in a direct message channel. It was astounding to me that this person thought this was a good idea, and also that the slack UX could so completely obfuscate an attempt at communication...

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#120

Post by swader999 »

o-__-o wrote: post #98
trynewideas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lots of hn readers use slack lots of hn slack users disliked the feature lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work

a few people figured out how to change their workflow to deal with the change. turns out the same problem that exists between non-technical users and technical users exist between power-elite users and the non-PE users. when you try to show a non-technical user a different way to do things, they get really frustrated and give up easily because their entire mental model needs to change (they were used to clicking on a…

I bow to your eliteness.
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