UX Issues with Notion

Totally fair, but I wouldn’t expect Notion to work exactly like a code editor. What I do like is they stick to the universal language of “working apps”.

So slash commands, markdown support, code snippets, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, rich embeds, etc.

Those are the bare minimum for me, but I don’t think any of their competitors actually have all of these features which is one of the reasons Notion is a good fit for me (and most people that try it).

Dropbox Paper has the best editing experience. Notion should try to emulate that.

I work in improving performance at a big tech company. It can be like dragging feet to get executives, managers and developers to care about improving performance because incentives are misaligned and it's frankly a chore compared to the million other things you have to be doing. It's also significantly harder to show the business metric improvement that comes from performance improvements than it does from simple A/B tests due how much variance there are in performance metrics compared to A/B testing. It's very much like security actually.

For games, it's not a 'culture', it's because games become very frustrating to play when non-responsive in anything fast paced, and thus will review badly and become 'not fun' and thus will not sell. It's directly connected to sales metrics, which is why management in game companies give space for it, and why CDPR recently offered refunds for a game because of bad perf on the PS4 tier of consoles, which is fairly unprecedented. You'll notice worse performance in slower paced games typically, such as Civ 6.

Also I've worked on trying to improve swift build perf and have worked on large C++ codebases before. The reason why C++ is slow to compile typically is because templates cause an explosion in code generation, everyone uses boost & the stdlib smart pointers & containers, which all template heavily and result in slow build perf and large binary sizes. Swift & rust do that, often implicitly and in an invisible to the programmer way and type inference are the typical reasons why it is slow and they too, create large binaries. When I started running into swift's build problems, I internally said to myself "oh boy, it's C++ again" and if you go to WWDC and talk to Xcode's engineers or swift compiler engineers, they often call swift 'new c++' and other not as nice names. Swift and rust are also incredibly complicated languages with a lot of edge cases when you start getting into the weeds, on par with C++.

Why are these languages using features such as type inference, stricter and more complicated type systems along with heavy templating? It's because now computers are fast enough to provide these 'developer ergonomics' and 'multithreaded memory safety without locks' that these features become viable in the compilers of today vs. the compilers of yesterday. If they could deliver such abilities in the past without having a compiler that takes too long, they would have. In the past C++ was known as a slow compiling language, like swift is today. You also notice slow build times in other 'statically sophisticated' languages such as scala or haskell.

Golang was specifically designed as a language to provide fast compile times. When they were designing the language, if they had to decide between cool language feature and fast build time, they chose fast build time.

Try to expand your horizons, just because you like something, it doesn't mean most people like it. I wish most people liked performance improvement work.

They recently upped the free tier to have unlimited blocks. I think the only restrictions on it now are uploaded file size limits

The slash handler is surely part of the cause of the higher typing latency compared to nearly every other program I use.

I know of no other app which does what they do. Other apps do things like cmd-space (spotlight, which I use ALL the time), ctrl-space (which I have mapped instead of ctrl-b in tmux), shift-shift, which opens search in JetBrains IDEs, etc. Notion could have made cmd or ctrl-/ open that menu at the current cursor location. Adding that one modifier requirement would eliminate so much badness.

As it is now, if your /-whatever is at the end of a line, you're stuck with that popup (hit ESC or mouseclick elsewhere). They even act on the / key within an inline ` code block! So if you want to type a code sample, and you happen to use / toward the end and then hit return as you naturally would, you will in fact select any match in that popup. Who edits code and manually applies styles to auto-syntax-highlighted code?

You may like the slash feature, but I believe strongly that UX educated people would consider this user-hostile. At minimum it is a visual disruption. You can type right on past it and it may eventually go away, but as a user you have to learn to ignore it. It is also absolutely consuming resources while it is going search filtering on every keypress you make until it gives up and goes away. If all you do is use Notion, then it may not be noticeable. But if you are a dev with multiple projects open, multiple local servers running, and other load, you do not need apps that simply waste resources.