
The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor - agwa
https://twitter.com/jedisct1/status/1201927500223438854
======
ianstormtaylor
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=1029374)

\-
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393)

\-
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162](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
adjacent inline elements, so that it can _only_ ever be at the ending edge of
the first inline element. Which makes certain selection states impossible. And
on top of that, they don't draw the cursor in the right spot when doing the
canonicalization. So for instance, it might look like your cursor is here:

    
    
        <b>one</b>|two
    

But it's actually here:

    
    
        <b>one|</b>two
    

Drawn in the wrong place. And impossible to put it at the beginning of "two"
at all! It's crazy!

I don't know how much the take "starring" into account, but it can't hurt to
star them in the hopes they're fixed sooner.

\---

Edit: If you want to see the craziness in action, check out this sandbox:

[https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-
breeze-6elsy](https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy)

1\. Try to put your cursor at the end of the word "one"

2\. Try to type a character at the start of the word "two"

~~~
tasuki
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.

~~~
jammaloo
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.

~~~
martinbooth
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"

~~~
333c
There is a position at the start of "two" in Firefox, but you have to approach
it from the right. That feels sane to me.

~~~
deathanatos
The "approach from the direction you want to take styling from" breaks down
when you cannot approach from the other direction, or if there are >2 possible
insertion points in the middle of a piece of text. I'm going to use Markdown
to show the markup in HN, but pretend like it's rich HTML:

    
    
      A string that ends in *bold!*
                                 // 
                                AB
    

Only position A is possible in Firefox's "approach from" algorithm; there is
no way to tack on non-bold text to the end, short adding it and then
re-/unformatting it.

You can then pretty quickly see what goes wrong here:

    
    
      A string that have *_italic bold_ and bold!*
                        ///
                       ABC
    

In Firefox, only positions A and C are possible; there is no way to start
editing at B.

I think you could turn any of these into interesting box forms like one of the
links in this thread that has two colored boxes, and you could have text
somewhere (like between A & B in the second example here) and delete that
text, and suddenly not be able to get a cursor back there, short of laying
some text down and reformatting it.

Markdown, and other markup/syntax based inputs, make this trivially obvious,
to a large degree. (Some ambiguities in the syntax can cause issues, but those
seem to be rarer than issues w/ Slacks WYSIWYG editor.)

------
danShumway
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 going to choose a
victory, Slack's Markdown editor would not be very high on my list of
priorities -- but I'll take it.

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

~~~
ricefield
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?

~~~
inferiorhuman
_Broken how?_

Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints
kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?

~~~
cortesoft
Every release will get complaints. They have to wait to see if it is more than
normal.

------
agluszak
Still waiting for an option to disable "drafts" (channels all of a sudden
jumping to the top of the channel list)

~~~
barrkel
Your mistake is showing a channel list. Hide unread channels; it's the only
way to use Slack IMO.

~~~
cortesoft
You mean hide read channels? If you hide unread, how will you find your new
messages?

~~~
barrkel
Yes, sorry

~~~
paulintrognon
You can edit your comment to fix it

~~~
barrkel
Not after 5 hours you can't. The cut off is 60 minutes.

I've been on this site since 2007, I've been around the block a few times ;)

------
ArmandGrillet
Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack
might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved
quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.

~~~
gota
Side comment: I've tried to use Slack's dark mode but had to quit. I was
constantly having to download images to be able to read the black-over-
transparent background of matplotlib images (that's apparently the default for
the axis, markings, legends, etc.)

It's not a matter of changing my code, too, because I want to see the images
posted by _other_ people

~~~
rcfox
I wonder if you could add a CSS rule to set the background colour of images to
white?

~~~
hapidjus
Or use a pseudo element with z-index -1

~~~
ZeikJT
Parent suggested a very sensible, simple, and efficient solution. Why suggest
a less efficient and more involved one?

------
fortytw2
It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around
Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that
it was when it first launched.

Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at
heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.

~~~
colechristensen
Does it need to change?

I don't _want_ Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.

~~~
bottled_poe
Yes, in order to provide a competitive advantage over the numerous clones that
are already coming along, Slack _must_ continue to innovate.

~~~
zbentley
And become what, Microsoft Teams? Everything for everyone ... executed badly?

Staying focused is orthogonal to continued innovation.

------
asmint3
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.

~~~
gempir
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.)

~~~
reportgunner
I'm sorry, but what users ?

AFAIK Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor.

Are there some hidden users that send font size 30 all capitals red colored
text in Times New Roman to each other ?

~~~
umanwizard
Office productivity tools do typically have WYSIWYG editors: Word, Outlook,
Gmail, ...

~~~
reportgunner
Thank you, it didn't occur to me that some users are actually using slack to
replace e-mail communication.

------
ripley12
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.

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

~~~
swader999
Judas priest this blows monkey goats.

------
dang
The big recent thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647)

A smaller one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950)

------
lilyball
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.

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

------
tempsy
Amazing to see how Slack turned from something everyone raved about to
something everyone is sort of annoyed with and critical of. Maybe that isn't
that surprising for most products as they age/mature but it seems particularly
acute with Slack.

~~~
Someone1234
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the
ones nobody uses.” -- Bjarne Stroustrup

I've found this quote extremely true, but not just with programming language
but with all things. People complain about Slack because they use Slack a lot,
so minor quibbles become a daily frustration.

It is when people go quiet about a product that you should really worry.
They're either extremely happy or aren't using it, might be critical to find
out which.

~~~
mehrdadn
> “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and
> the ones nobody uses.” -- Bjarne Stroustrup

> I've found this quote extremely true

My impression of Python, Ruby, etc. hasn't been that they're in either of
those categories, though I'll grant you that they don't compete in the same
space as C++...

~~~
ProZsolt
I use Ruby(not Rails) daily. I love the language. It's really good for fast
prototyping or small scrips but I can complain all-day long for how bad is to
maintain big codebases because of the dynamic nature of it. I really miss type
hints that can make this much easier.

------
SCdF
Thank the maker.

I'm sure it is perfectly fine if you just bold stuff sometimes, but it's so
wonky with anything slightly complicated, and completely messes with my muscle
memory compared with every other application I use that doesn't mess around
with this stuff.

------
soneca
It 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.

~~~
trynewideas
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

~~~
o-__-o
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 an icon in a certain spot, goto a menu,
select an option, get a dialog etc.). To them this represents a massive
unknown if they do even one step wrong and so instead of accepting and using
the new feature, regardless of the perceived benefit their anxiety takeover.

The correlations here is astounding. I'm the kind of person who will vocally
speak out about emacs vs vi or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t", but
the WYSIWYG editor didn't fundamentally break my mental model of Slack. I just
learned to adapt, but seeing the blowback.. holy cow.

~~~
Izkata
> 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.

~~~
o-__-o
I didn't do a good job, "see-out" vs "sowt" (the t is not hard)

~~~
Izkata
Still, I'm thinking of "kowt"

------
njacobs5074
I’m a bit amused because:

1\. Their customer support emphatically told me they wouldn’t make this an
option AND

2\. They didn’t even need to do a new release to turn on the option.

At least their engineering team is still making good decisions :)

~~~
anonytrary
Customer Support having outdated/bad communication with Product is not
surprising at all. For every person where the person who makes the decisions
is not the person to relay the decisions, this error can be introduced. It's
like a big game of telephone.

------
outworlder
What's more ridiculous is that this WYSIWYG editor is not only a front-end
change, it changes the backend. And broke our bot. I have no idea why anything
else should care. Their changelog didn't make the problem obvious.

Took me a bunch of time to track down the issue, as it worked for a few
people, but the bot would completely ignore other people – including my boss.

[https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630](https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630)

------
wool_gather
Well, they put it in the "Advanced" settings section, which I interpret as
reluctance, but it's there.

~~~
munk-a
I am a bit afraid they might be supplying it for just a limited while for them
to fix it up and re-enable it for everyone.

------
ulrikrasmussen
I just changed to the ripcord desktop client, and couldn't be happier. While
not as superficially polished, it is super responsive and does what you would
expect of a chat app very well. Overall, I think the UI is less ugly, because
I judge latency as one of the ugliest warts in UI.

------
mikl
I was never a fan of their pseudo-markdown (it’s so close, but the minor
deviations are _annoying_ ), but it’s a great to have it back instead of that
other train-wreck of an editor. At least you can now edit text without
regularly wanting scream in frustration.

~~~
munk-a
For someone who habitually uses old MUD style emote lead-ins I was constantly
needing to back edit comments to fix:

* sigh * this was disappointing

being turned into a list.

------
ncmncm
Now all we need is a setting to make employers not require you to run it.

I have thought about why ggl hangouts at my current employer has been ok. We
mostly only use direct, 1 to 1 windows so any activity is certainly to be
relevant, and nothing important scrolls off screen.

------
themattress
Thanks to all that ruckus I discovered Ripcord and have been enjoying how
snappy it is. Not pretty but works well for me.

------
vhogemann
Bring back the IRC gateway.

~~~
bfrog
Just bring back IRC

~~~
dividedbyzero
Ugh no. IRC was great in its day, and I'm sure there are things today that
it's still good enough for, but at work, I vastly prefer Slack (and possibly
other similar tools, but I haven't power-used any of them yet.) I've been a
very, very regular IRC user up until a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go
back.

With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive
messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution.
No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day
off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June.

No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible
without clicking a link or DDC-sending things.

No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws
icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and
someone should check this right now).

Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last
time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some
custom network bot.

It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack
integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook
if none is offered. We do that a lot.

No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did
this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch
places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very,
very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief.

No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary,
details in thread" – extremely useful.

No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and
see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy-
pasted the wrong numbers", etc.

Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by
lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client
(like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it
might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX
candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.

~~~
qxnqd
No way to embed things... no emojis... no editing or deleting... seems like
you are enumerating the advantages of IRC

~~~
braythwayt
Reminds me of trying to explain why Markdown is so good.

Alice: “But why do you use it? It doesn’t do so much!”

Bobbi: “Exactly why I love it.”

------
dotmavriq
What is the proposed utility of moving from being Markdown-friendly to getting
all of these WYSIWYG solutions or " Simpler than Markdown " editing options on
boards and chat solutions.

I really struggle to comprehend it, would it not be better to just have some
sort of "standard" we all can go after?

Genuinely interested in knowing what companies are thinking, is it feedback-
driven?

------
vesche
Thank God. This was the worst thing ever.

------
wodenokoto
I 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.

~~~
MrOxiMoron
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...

~~~
wodenokoto
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.

------
srathi
When will they add tabs for open conversations? Why is there a limit one of
open conversation at a time? Many times I lose the person I was talking to and
have to hunt down few names to find it out again.

------
marcoperaza
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.

------
shmerl
Looks like markdown for bullet items is still broken. Try

    
    
        * test1
        * test2

------
shmerl
Thanks for fixing something that shouldn't have been broken in the first
place.

------
sethammons
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.

------
aflag
That's great! I've been using a JavaScript hack to avoid it for a while. The
current editor has so many not well thought through corner cases!

------
k-godwin
Just fyi for anyone who finds it MIA in the brower, you just need to refresh
to get the option.

------
cyrusmg
Do not forget you can say thank you via the /feedback command in Slack

~~~
stephenr
"Thank you for giving us a hard to find, poorly named option to opt out of
your buggy shit"?

------
ancorevard
How to force this option for the whole organization/workspace?

------
draklor40
Moral of the day: Grumpiest programmers win !

------
pkamb
Now support real Markdown.

~~~
munk-a
In particular their ``` code block support is super frustrating, especially
since copying a code block produces invalid markdown even if it was originally
written properly, they like to pull new lines out of it.

------
mdszy
"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."

~~~
geoffreyhale
Source?

~~~
sm4rk0
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828)

~~~
munk-a
Well, I'm quite happy they had to shamefully walk that statement back - seems
like it might have been a feature pushed arbitrarily by a C-level fiat rather
than user research.

Having the WYSIWYG thing as an option is nice - forcing everyone into it less
so.

