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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

#161

Looks like this doesn't bring back the markup help text in the lower-right corner, which is a shame. I really wish they'd just highlight your markup in the appropriate style while leaving the markup intact. That would solve the "I want to see what the markup I just typed will do" without any of the problems of the WYSIWYG approach. Basically just syntax highlighting for markup.

This is pretty much what Bear does. It's great.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above demo works fine in Firefox, FWIW. I had a large hand in building a WYSIWYG email editor a few years back, using direct DOM editing, that was the most full featured available at the time. I would only recommend it to people with very high pain tolerance, as the differences between browsers are stark, undocumented and hard to work around.

In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor. I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"

Don't Fuck with Paste, extension that disables anti-paste event handlers some banks use, triggers this when pasting into rich editors. Even Facebook and old Slack editor, IIRC.

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

#163

In 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…

I really hope they don’t think they can fix a few “bugs” and make this thing usable.

I’ve noticed this in the past, when a previous employer got rid of their Markdown interface for interview candidate feedback. In response to everyone’s angry comments about their flaky piece of garbage WYSIWYG replacement, they responded “please file bugs if our Markdown-like shortcuts aren’t working right!”

They were completely missing the point since even if their tool was 100% bug free (which it wasn’t, and I’m sure still isn’t), WYSIWYG editing will NEVER feel like text editing, and I NEVER want it in a critical work tool.

Honestly people thinking their WYSIWYG editor “supports markdown” because “Star Star” is an alternate shortcut for Ctrl+B seems to be so severely missing the mark that I wonder if they’re deliberately insulting my intelligence.

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

#164

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…

I emailed them to tell them I would stop using slack completely and start emailing my coworkers instead if they didn’t revert it. I assume hundreds of others sent similar mails.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Broken how? This feels like a good example of a company building and launching something, then watching and responding to how the public/users react to it. Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?

The problem isn’t that they launched a feature, it’s that they unilaterally removed a feature people were using.

Everyone would have been totally fine with it being behind a toggle, even if on by default.

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

#166
post #158

Don’t understand the need for a WYSIWYG editor in the first place. It’s not a word processor. The need to add formatting to a Slack message should be rare enough that the WYSIWYG overhead just isn’t worth it.

They want to make the product appeal to all users and not just techy ones. And If I product managers or CEO or whoever can print his message bold he's happy. Very few non techy people know what markdown even is. (From my own experience asking friends etc.)

Step 1: google “how to make text bold in Slack”

There is no step 2, that’s literally all you need to do.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor. I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"

Don't Fuck with Paste, extension that disables anti-paste event handlers some banks use, triggers this when pasting into rich editors. Even Facebook and old Slack editor, IIRC.

Yup, in order to be able to paste into any of those inputs you need to have clipboard events on
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