Not sure if it was a regression, but I found myself _having_ to use the editor to insert an image in a thread. I couldn't drag and drop in the threads view.
The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
191–200 of 225 posts
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#192I don't get the commotion about this. The old slack editor was really poor, and the new one is just as poor, but differently. But at least with the WYSIWYG you can see before you send what parts of the markup it got wrong.
yes, but with the new one there are situations where you can't correct a mistake once you see it. just start with a backtick escaped piece and then try to add extra text at the beginning of the line...
Okay lets say that that action would cause me to write outside the backticked area.
How would I go about adding something new to the beginning of a backticked area placed at the beginning of a line? That would either be impossible, or there would be a move of the cursor that doesn't move a character (to go in and out of the backtick/code segment.)
Isn't that just how it always is when working in WYSIWYG? The same struggle is real in word or google docs, where you constantly have to add a remove formatting when editing around inline blocks with styles or formatting.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#193In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjac…
My request for every rich text WYSIWYG editor is as follows: please never change the text style of my cursor unless I explicitly say so. Regardless of the cursor's location.
Toggling bold should function identically to toggling caps lock: if I press the bold button, any letters I type should be bold until I press the bold button again. Caps lock does not disable itself when I click into a non-all-caps block of text, and neither should bold.
This would be annoying sometimes, but it would help far more often than it would hurt. For some reason, however, nobody does it this way.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#194This 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…
How do you know it was social media? I contacted Slack's customer support and asked for a toggle. It could have been my request. The customer support chat was fast, friendly, and professional. I couldn't ask for more.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#195This 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…
How do you know it was social media? I contacted Slack's customer support and asked for a toggle. It could have been my request. The customer support chat was fast, friendly, and professional. I couldn't ask for more.
The original people who contacted customer support got this message:
> "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 feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering."[0]
It is of course possible that your particular request was super persuasive and caused them to change their mind, but the more likely explanation is the scale of the public backlash forced them to reconsider.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#196It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time. No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.
I'd love to know in a year what percentage of users disable the WYSIWYG editor.
It blows me away that there are almost 2000 people working at Slack. The product feels like it is done and they should be able to downsize to a skeleton crew and slip into maintenance mode.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t" Wait, "cout" from C++? "Clout" is a real English word, I always figured it was pronounced the same minus the "l", which is neither of the versions you have there.
i always pronounced it as "see-out", since i figured the "c" refers to, well, C. seems in line with cout's docs which mention "the standard C output stream `stdout`"
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#198In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjac…
My request for every rich text WYSIWYG editor is as follows: please never change the text style of my cursor unless I explicitly say so. Regardless of the cursor's location. Toggling bold should function identically to toggling caps lock: if I press the bold button, any letters I type should be bold until I press the bold button again. Caps lock does not disable itself when I click into a non-all-caps block of text,…
If I'm in non-bold mode and I click in the middle of a bold word/sentence to make edits, do I automatically start typing in non-bold? That sounds much more annoying than helpful.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#199In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjac…
It's been a while since I read this, but IIRC this article describes that bugs like these are exactly the reason why CodeMirror doesn't rely on contentEditable: https://codemirror.net/doc/internals.html
> CodeMirror 1 was heavily reliant on designMode or contentEditable (depending on the browser). Neither of these are well specified (HTML5 tries to specify their basics), and, more importantly, they tend to be one of the more obscure and buggy areas of browser functionality—CodeMirror, by using this functionality in a non-typical way, was constantly running up against browser bugs.
Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
My request for every rich text WYSIWYG editor is as follows: please never change the text style of my cursor unless I explicitly say so. Regardless of the cursor's location. Toggling bold should function identically to toggling caps lock: if I press the bold button, any letters I type should be bold until I press the bold button again. Caps lock does not disable itself when I click into a non-all-caps block of text,…
If I'm in non-bold mode and I click in the middle of a bold word/sentence to make edits, do I automatically start typing in non-bold? That sounds much more annoying than helpful.
> If I'm in non-bold mode and I click in the middle of a bold word/sentence to make edits, do I automatically start typing in non-bold
Yes! You'd need to press ⌘B to enter bold mode, and then begin typing.
It's ever-so-slightly more effort, to be sure. But, I loose so much more time trying to add non-bold to the end of a bold section, or vise versa.
I can learn to use systems which behave in repeatable and understandable ways. Once a system starts making decisions for me based on information I can't see—like invisible markup tags—everything becomes much harder.
The alternative is of course to make the markup visible, but for writing prose, I appreciate the clean look of WYSIWYG editors. Visible markup can feel messy.