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The Internet

Slack's New Rich Text Editor Shows That Markdown Still Scares People (vice.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Slack just updated its longtime editor for its primary interface -- and the rich-text result hints at a longstanding tension over how much of a helping hand users need from their text editors and communication programs. From a report: Power users, like programmer Arthur O'Dwyer, make the case that they don't really need any -- and the rich-text interface they added just gets in the way. "I wish Slack would provide a way to disable the WYSIWYG rich-text-input box," he wrote in a viral blog post. "I don't think it's useful, and it's extremely annoying to have to keep backspacing to fix mistakes." After the decision was criticized by O'Dwyer and others (and after this article was published), Slack told Motherboard that it would switch gears and provide an option to bring the old interface back.

It noted that it was trying to make the app more palatable to the broader audience of users it's gained in recent years since. But concerns from older users who liked the prior Markdown-driven interface led the company to rethink the decision, and bring the tool back in the coming weeks. "Our recently introduced WYSIWYG formatting toolbar was developed with that broader customer community in mind," the company said. "We thought we had nailed it, but we have seen an outpouring of feedback from customers who love using Slack with markup." The situation will find a happy medium resolved in the coming weeks as Slack brings back the old editor, but it nonetheless highlights a central question that created the debate in the first place: Can we ever truly accept Markdown formatting -- which the old Slack editor relies on -- in the mainstream?
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Slack's New Rich Text Editor Shows That Markdown Still Scares People More

Slack's New Rich Text Editor Shows That Markdown Still Scares People

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  • It makes sense (Score:3)

    by NotARealUser ( 4083383 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @12:55PM (#59452448)
    I personally liked the markdown feature, but it is not for everyone. Slack appeals to a broader audience than just programmers. They provide a useful tool for a broad range of people, and using markdown is too much like "code" for a large subset of the population.
    • It makes better sense to provide both options. Years ago I used a Mediawiki plugin that let you switch between WYSIWYG editing and ASCII markup at will (for a private Wiki). A lot of our authors switched to the visual editor, but quite a few preferred to use markup text.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        I don't really understand why it's so hard to provide both, or even just merge them. The later versions of Microsoft's Equation Editor actually do this reasonably well: click the little buttons if you like, or just type a subset of almost-Latex. If they got rid of the "almost" part....

    • I personally liked the markdown feature, but it is not for everyone. Slack appeals to a broader audience than just programmers. They provide a useful tool for a broad range of people, and using markdown is too much like "code" for a large subset of the population.

      I'm going to propose a broader, more fundamental, and bound-to-be-unpopular opinion and say, I don't think Slack should include rich text at all. If it makes sense to have any formatting, it's more for things programmers would do, e.g. marking things as code and syntax highlighting. I can see value in bullet lists, for example, but you can do that in text by starting the line with an asterisk-- which, not coincidentally, will automatically create a bullet list in Markdown.

      This aren't presentations or pri

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Falos ( 2905315 )

        It WAS a mistake.

        Setting aside the stats on how much of email became spam, and how spamlike the rest became, dumb email means more security. Imagine the economic losses it has cost us.

        At least slack's whoring isn't really a security hurt, or one of those copypasta WYSIWYG jobbies that just make pages bloat and hang [even more].

      • I've found overstrike to be useful. I'll make a post in a channel, and then come back and overstrike it if conditions change. It leaves the original announcement but, but indicates it's no longer valid.

      • What's the harm in having the feature for people who want to use it?

  • Did Slack ask any users what they thought?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Did they ask users? (Score:5, Funny)

      by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:15PM (#59452548)

      Did Slack ask any users what they thought?

      They tried, but people were just too scared.

    • Re:Did they ask users? (Score:5, Funny)

      by grumpy-cowboy ( 4342983 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:26PM (#59452600)

      They did but users responded with animated GIFs and emoticons.

    • Re:Did they ask users? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cid Highwind ( 9258 ) on Monday November 25, 2019 @01:26PM (#59452602) Homepage
      Please, this is 2019. We don't ask. We implement new features, crank the telemetry up to "if this app was your ex, you would get a restraining order against it" levels of intrusive creepiness, and test them on a random subset of users who don't know they signed up to be guinea pigs and/or our QA department.
    • Rich text editing was a promo project for some mid-level manager who decided their product vision was best. Slack is thinks it's special. Meanwhile Microsoft Teams is literally knocking at the door.

      • Rich text editing was a promo project for some mid-level manager who decided their product vision was best.

        I think you pretty much nailed it.

        Probably it began with someone doing a fancy ascii post... something with a box around it... multi-column aligned stuff... that sort of thing... like every BBS did back in the day...

        ...but for some random dipshit slack dev, accomplishing it himself in his own posts was HARD, and he ended up thinking "why cant it be like something I already know" .. "why shoudnt everyone be able to do that" ... "I'm constantly off-by-1 and it fucks up the intended formatting"

        Of course

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tomahawk ( 1343 )

      They didn't ask me, but I gave them my opinion anyway. When my desktop client updated 2 weeks ago with this god-awful wysiwyg text box I got onto their support to ask how to disable it (you can't), and to point out several really annoying bugs in it. I was told that my feedback would be passed to the relevant people.

      It looks like enough other people have had similar issues that they are now going to add the option to go back the the old way.

      I'm 2 weeks in and still hate this new text box. It's still trip

  • Threading and the drafts folder are prime examples of features that have no redeeming value outside of sales, and with no way to turn off.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by t0rkm3 ( 666910 )

      Agreed on the drafts thing... that's just wrong. It moves the message to another region, for no reason at all, half-written texts worked just fine sitting where they were.

      Threading can be useful to prevent scroll and find if you are replying to a particular thought in a fast scrolling channel.

    • huh? i am very much not in sales and use the thread feature all the time, it's useful for side discussions that might derail the main thread or not be relevant to the whole channel, but minor and not deserving their own channel or group chat
  • Lets just that.

    • I can't agree more. We spent 30 years on a formatting language that's now ubiquitous. Hey I know, let's replace it.with something that came out of nowhere that.does a fraction of what HTML does?

      • I can't agree more. We spent 30 years on a formatting language that's now ubiquitous. Hey I know, let's replace it.with something that came out of nowhere that.does a fraction of what HTML does?

        HTML?

        You young uns don't know what a well established markup language looks like.

      • Not everyone needs full HTML for all use cases. Markdown is much easier and faster to type.

        that came out of nowhere that

        It came out of "nowhere" in 2004. The original "This is why I made markdown" post still stands as valid: https://daringfireball.net/pro... [daringfireball.net]

        Multiple websites like Reddit already use it and have little to no problem with it. For security reasons it's not like Slashdot supports all the HTML tags. If you're just making lists, links and bolding/italicizing a body of text Markdown wins hands down.

        It's the defacto markup for

        • Markdown is nice, but it has two problems:
          a) incompatible implementations - well, only a minor issue
          b) a little bit retarded syntax

          *something itallic* is italic, huh? Who uses italic unless it is a /. quote?
          **something bold**, seriously? You double the same marker to make something bold? WTF!
          ***bold and italic***, at least some consistency

          I find that idiotic ... for me that is problematic as I have to "memorize" things I super bad at (because it senseless and trivial and certainly not intuitive). I either h

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cederic ( 9623 )

          I decided to look at Markdown for writing one of my books. Knocked up a sample couple of pages, ran it through a couple of viewers, a couple of publishing renderers..

          All of them looked different. All of them ignored some elements, but none of them ignored the same ones. All of them looked shit.

          I'd much rather have WYSIWYG for 99% of creations, and something as simple as HTML or BBCode suffices for the rest. Quit with the arcane language in a fucking chat program.

  • How hard is it to have a "source" button?

    It's always going to be a minority of folks who want to use markup manually, but those who do like it really like it.

    If virtually every HTML editing widget out there can let you use both, why couldn't Slack's Markdown widget?

  • Gebus people - while flavors vary, Markdown in general is meant to be 100% compatible with HTML. It'll look for certain markers in text (double astrix, uderscores, and the like) and convert it to HTML. BUT **dramatic gasp** you can ALSO just write HTML!

    Given the implementation of Slack, their "rich text" is just HTML. Thus, Markdown & HTML/rich text are in no ways incompatible. Its been a while since I've used Slack (yeah, we're on Teams - nuff about that) - but this is solvable by just adding radio

  • Markdown is awful. Just about every "rich text" standard is awful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      I can confirm that markdown is awful because I have to deal with it whenever I want to make a comment on a TDWTF article. The problem is that it picks up on things that no average person would recognize as mark-up commands (such as asterisks becoming boldface commands), but it also eats up things that an average person would not recognize as redundant, such as single-return line breaks.

      Meanwhile, it still allows HTML such as <br> to force those single line breaks. If the whole point was not to have t

  • If you can't handle markdown, then I don't trust you with anything but plain text formatting anyway. It's a good razor.

  • Any HCI manual would state you should provide friendly interface for newbies (like the rich text editor) and options to the advanced users (disable the text editor and keep markdown). But, of course, read HCI material is too mainstream nowadays...

  • Markdown is tedious mental overhead. Having to remember which layout language this is (compared to TeX, or other layout languages, or the fomatting-as-YAML, and so on) is an pain in the neck. I want to write text, not wrangle a layout language and then imagine what it will look like. I want to use my brain to compose prose, not to run a realtime rendering engine in my head while I type in markdown.

    I can use markdown just fine. I resent markdown.

    Markdown is tedious mental overhead, exactly the same as keepin

    • Basically every markdown editor, shows the text how it will be rendered.
      No idea what your problem is.

      Yes, it looks odd that
      **some bold text**

      Is a bold text starting with two asterixes, nevertheless it is rendered bold, and the output will be bold without the two asterixes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Basically every markdown editor, shows the text how it will be rendered.

        ..by that editor.

        Not how it will be rendered elsewhere, because they're all fucking different. Shit, it's worse than the early browser wars, at least they all did basic fucking html.

  • This is the exact type of crap that makes me HATE Slack. Just allow people to turn it off. I don't even care if you turn on new features by default. Just let me turn it off. Slack does so many things this way, that I just want to abandon it completely.

  • I'm glad this topic was brought up, because I despise the new WYSIWYG / rich editor. It is buggy as can be. I can't count how many times it will start formatting a `code` style block and then not let me turn it off, no matter what I try. The copy / paste of something that was formatted into a new message is a massive mess. If you are doing straightforward text entry it usually works, but as soon as you start doing more advanced non-linear editing of a message, or copy / paste, it falls apart.

    Please add

  • > Can we ever truly accept Markdown formatting

    As soon as Slashdot implements it, *this* comment will format correctly.

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