
Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible - ingve
https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/11/20/slack-rich-text-box/
======
guessmyname
This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver,
Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily
commute already told me they _—and a handful of other employees—_ hate the
WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their
role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

~~~
paulddraper
For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to create two adjacent but
separate code blocks.

    
    
        ```
        one
        ```
        ```
        two
        ```
    

I've tried and tried.

~~~
jschuur
You can exit a code block by hitting Command Option Shift C. I found this out
by hovering over the code block icon in the bar below the editor box.

The trick seems to be to add a blank final line, otherwise, it will not
include the last line you typed in a code block.

~~~
pulse7
So in other words: you still need to be "tech savvy" to do this...

~~~
mdaniel
Only if you care about that level of specificity of the results; and given
that non-technical people love pasting code snippets into slack without the
code fences, I'm guessing this change isn't even wanted by non-technical
people, and only made detail-oriented folks upset

------
sean0-
Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the
following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product
Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs.

>>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're
sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your
team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone
into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people
for whom the existing behavior was working just fine. We've started working on
a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We
don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top
and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop
within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter. We will
follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll
include instructions on how to enable it. Again, we're sorry for the
disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this
feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in
the future.

~~~
aclelland
Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter
account it's also saying the same[1]

I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who
wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know
what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting.

[1]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...](https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197640136172937218)

~~~
AceyMan
And in more than one place, viz.,
[https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764819999085772...](https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197648199990857728)

And something that occurred to me: if it's true that "in the future everyone
will code (to some degree)," don't you think it's OK to start the baby steps
of textual thinking?

C'mon, it's markup with like six modes, people. Practice for half as long as
you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day and you'll be fluent.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Practice for half as long as you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day
> and you'll be fluent.

To be fair, you could learn almost anything in that amount of time;)

------
tbabb
This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor.

In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine
grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup _is_ bad UX. Give them
a WYSIWYG; that's fine.

But don't _remove_ the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a
_perfect_ one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that
satisfies that).

IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a
table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you
could do but recreate it. _TERRIBLE_ design.

~~~
bartread
> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor.

Oh my goodness: triggered.

I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this.

"But, but, we used it at blah company."

"Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me
angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it."

I _DO NOT_ want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, capricious,
and neutered version of Microsoft Word 6 to edit the contents of a web page.

I will become extremely displeased with you if you waste my time by trying to
persuade me it's a good idea. It's not.

~~~
kelseydh
Yeah, the very first time I used Confluence I was in shock of how developer's
at one time could have thought this was a good or useful product for
discussing/planning code changes.

For ticketing software, I find Clubhouse to be much better than JIRA. Normal
markdown that doesn't drive you insane. Much slicker all around.

~~~
alexis_fr
Concerning Clubhouse.io, it looks great, is there a download version? I know
“Cloud is the way to go”, but I work in Men’s Rights (DV abuses, etc) and it
is usually something that cloud companies don’t want on their platform, so
we’re constantly at risk of being revoked.

~~~
benhurmarcel
No modern software works locally, it's always all in the cloud. That's why
most large companies (and some cases like yours) stick with the big guys like
Atlassian and Microsoft; the new competition doesn't support their data
requirements.

~~~
gridlockd
A lot of that stuff still works self-hosted, which is a hard requirement in
some places.

------
livueta
Specific bug gripes aside: I see this editor as emblematic of Slack's broader
shift away from what I think it should be (primarily synchronous chat; irc
with a friendlier ui and integrated bouncer features) towards what many people
seem to want to use it as (async-heavy pseudo-replacement for email where I
get to sit and watch the "...is typing" indicator flicker while somebody
writes an essay at me).

My rule of thumb generally is: if I need significant rich text formatting in a
message I'm writing, it should probably just be an email.

I feel like this increasing hybridization of sync/async comms is largely
counterproductive and especially harmful to work-life balance, so it's
unfortunate that companies like Slack are apparently unable to focus on core
competencies and instead must shoot for disruptive growth via poorly-executed
junk like this editor.

~~~
ken
I personally have no problem with the hybridization of sync/async
communication. That's where everything is headed. People send emails and
sometimes expect them to be delivered and/or read immediately. OTOH, people
send messages over these "chat" services that aren't time sensitive, simply
because it's easy and available.

My problem is that all these networks are proprietary and isolated. When
someone comes up with a really bad idea in their UI, you're SOL until they
decide to fix it. When someone comes up with a really good idea, you have to
hope their competitors re-implement it. And all they can do is gently try to
guide their network into the place they want to occupy on the sync-async
spectrum via features.

Looking back at the history of computing, I see that when a protocol is open
and has many competing implementations, it lives on far beyond what the
original designers ever intended. When a protocol is proprietary and
implemented only by a single proprietary UI, it has a fairly short lifespan.
What I can't tell is if these companies don't know their history, or if they
think they're going to be the first ones ever to beat this trend, or if they
don't care and just want to grab money while they can.

~~~
coleifer
> My problem is that all these networks are proprietary and isolated. When
> someone comes up with a really bad idea in their UI, you're SOL until they
> decide to fix it.

Tons of people said this early on, but the people who make decisions for team
tooling/workflows apparently didn't think that was as important. Symptomatic
of the disconnect between what most engineers think of as "quality" versus
others.

------
jdoliner
I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for
me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in
backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG
editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/<asterisk>/<asterisk>`,
things work normally up until the second "<asterisk>" at which point the "/"
between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't bold
text inside of backticks. Then when I input the second "`" it becomes a
monospace block containing `//` and the "<asterisk>"s have completely ceased
to exist.

They also somehow broke the tab key for tabbing through users when you're
trying to @ someone, after the first tab it just starts refocusing your input
boxes rather than selecting different users.

Edit: Ironically, HN's built in markdown seems to understand asterisks, but
not backticks, which leads to behavior similar to Slack's that I'm ranting
about, I've replaced them with <asterisk> to make it clear.

~~~
somebodythere
There's some delicious irony in those slashes getting swallowed by HN's
markdown parser.

~~~
mdaniel
HN does not use markdown, otherwise a lot more formatting would work; it's
four leading spaces to code block something, and asterisks for italics, and
that's it AFAIK

------
ajkjk
The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know
it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product
managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need
to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because
no one stops them.

I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

~~~
aero142
I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that
the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical
programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. _shows Office
365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers_. We have an opportunity to take
this to the next level. We need to make this _the_ goto office communication
platform. _cheers_. Markdown may seem easy to use to us, but our user research
shows that 90% of fortune 500 employees don't even know what markdown is. We
need a more familiar interface to break into this lucrative new market and
continue our growth."

~~~
Roark66
>I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that
the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical
programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office
365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take
this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication
platform. cheers.

You're probably right. However, Slack will never be _the_ goto office
communication platform until it integrates with AD and that will not happen
because MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as
Lync).

~~~
huckyaus
>MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync)

Teams, not Skype for Business, is Microsoft's Slack competitor.

~~~
arethuza
Not sure why you were being voted down - Teams was explicitly positioned as a
competitor for Slack.

------
darkcl
I have contacted them, and they replied me with this

Lucas (Slack) Nov 20, 9:15 PM PST

Hi there,

Thank you for taking the time to write in and provide this feedback. 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.

We are committed to doing what we can to improve the new experience for you,
and will continue to make improvements to the new editor. If there are any
specific examples of how these changes are impacting your daily work, please
let me know. The more detail you can share about your experience, the better
we can understand how to keep making it better.

Regards,

Lucas.

Anyone know how to reverse engineer Slack desktop client?

~~~
userbinator
You should point out how blatantly contradictory these two sentences are...

 _Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users_

 _disabling the new formatting tool isn 't an option that we will be offering_

...unless their goal is to reduce "all Slack users" to "only those who don't
need the option"...

~~~
3JPLW
It's particularly amusing/frustrating/enraging because _they have already
shown that it 's possible!_ Up until today, I've had some workspaces with the
old (and functional!) text entry, and some with the new one — in the same app!

------
it33
Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an
engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who
wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs.

For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for
engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.

~~~
vxNsr
Hey, have there ever been discussions about a making a truly native client?
not a web wrapper?

imo a fast native client, that doesn't look like a sad slack clone (which
teams currently does) would put you streets ahead of the entire field.

I know it means increasing code complexity.

but by golly would it be nice to have a truly nice client.

~~~
it33
Yes, there's an on-going discussion about going to native clients. One path is
React Native going desktop, similar to how we've done our iOS and Android
apps. We should probably do something about encouraging some early
prototyping.

Highly appreciate the feedback,

~~~
Kleinlieu
There’s a lot of speed you can muster out of the different platforms the
closer you are to the metal. That said, I would love to help out if it’s an
open source project. There are some developments at least on the iOS side,
like SwiftUI, that could make writing and maintaining these native apps easier
than you may be thinking.

------
Tade0
As someone who used to be part of a team developing one of the most popular
in-browser WYSIWYG editors:

1\. Browser WYSIWYGs are _really_ hard to make.

2\. All browser WYSIWYGs are terrible.

Avoid rolling your own WYSIWYG if you can. Even if you have a team of 1500
people at your disposal.

~~~
ryankshaw
what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor
for a large website

~~~
Tade0
I'm obviously biased and would probably recommend what I was working
on(CKEditor), but here are some observations regarding the various
propositions:

CKEditor 4 excels in two things:

-Handling selection - especially tables.

-Editing for accessibility.

I would recommend v5 though, otherwise you'd be potentially giving my one good
friend, who's already very busy maintaining v4, even more work. :D

[https://textbox.io/](https://textbox.io/) \- these guys gave us a run for our
money a few years ago with their paste-from-external-source (e.g. Word)
capabilities, but I believe they've been since acquired by Tiny.

[https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce](https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce) \- I
think this one is slowly being cannibalized by TextBox. I remember them
receiving a lot of funding at one point, but getting nowhere with it.

Froala - avoid. It's not really open-source, and judging how support for
paying customers works you're not getting your money's worth.

Quill - we've never seen them as a threat, so maybe they're not that good?
Especially given that Slack thing that's currently unfolding.

Edit: Formatting.

~~~
andfrob
To clear up some confusion around TinyMCE and Textbox.io. The products came to
be under the same umbrella due to the merger of Ephox and Moxiecode. The
combined company was renamed Tiny last year.

TinyMCE version 5, released earlier this year, incorporated much of the
Textbox.io features and technology and is the main product moving forward. It
is better than Textbox.io in almost every way now and is recommended for new
projects.

Tiny did indeed raise $4M in venture capital last year. It has not been
squandered by any means. In fact, we have only just started spending it as we
were profitable and growing when we first raised the money.

Tiny has a good-sized development team with more than 30 people in
engineering, QA, design and product management. Of the many options out there,
TinyMCE is a good bet!

(disclosure: I am a founder and the CEO at Tiny)

------
Arathorn
Amusingly, for [https://riot.im](https://riot.im) we just shelved our WYSIWYG
editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the
years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it's a nightmare
to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn't a
wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good
enough.

Our current editor was written from scratch (codenamed CIDER), and seems to
work pretty well for markdown input + some semantic elements like prettified
usernames, room names, etc.

[https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-
sdk/blob/develop/...](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-
sdk/blob/develop/docs/ciderEditor.md) tells all about CIDER, and
[https://blog.riot.im/riot-web-1-5/](https://blog.riot.im/riot-web-1-5/) gives
the full context if anyone cares :)

~~~
bmarkovic
The fact that this industry turned to a proprietary low-quality solution like
Slack when Riot/Matrix have already existed tells the full story about what a
bunch of incompetent idiots we all are.

Everyone frustrated with the new Slack input box deserves what they got. Me
included.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution":
you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're
good to go.

With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should
really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption.

(also, I don't know if Riot is that much better; opening
[https://riot.im/app/](https://riot.im/app/) makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my
laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation)

~~~
buboard
> solutions things are more complex

it's kinda sad that it has come to be that tech companies will consider
installing matrix "complex".

~~~
raverbashing
> it's kinda sad that it has come to be that tech companies will consider
> installing matrix "complex".

I go to the Matrix website and there's a lot of "blah blah blah" about how
it's an open network, a decentralized messaging protocol yada yada yada"
Nothing about "how to actually start using the thing"

Then you get here finally [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-
now/](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/)

> To get started using Matrix, pick a client and join #matrix:matrix.org. You
> can also check the Matrix Clients Matrix to see more detail.

Or then there's this which looks more like it:
[https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction/](https://matrix.org/docs/guides/introduction/)

Compare this with going to Slack's web page and clicking "Try Slack".

More importantly, you don't need to get IT or Procurement involved to try
slack.

~~~
feanaro
> More importantly, you don't need to get IT or Procurement involved to try
> slack.

Are you implying you do have to do so to try out Matrix? You can simply use
the web version of Riot hosted here
([https://riot.im/app](https://riot.im/app)) and sign up for a free account on
matrix.org.

There's a link to this accessible from the "Try Matrix Now" page you
referenced above. Admittedly, it seems the words inviting you to try Riot "on
the web" were linked to
[https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot)
instead of to [https://riot.im/app/](https://riot.im/app/). That's probably a
mistake and should be fixed.

~~~
raverbashing
Thanks for that info.

But when you try the Riot app on a Matrix server, can you create you own
private workspace there or it's more like an IRC channel?

Because Slack let you have your own workspace/"server" in the free plan
[https://slack.com/intl/en-ie/pricing/free?geocode=en-
ie&from...](https://slack.com/intl/en-ie/pricing/free?geocode=en-
ie&from_pricing=1) (you'll have some limits, but you get your own private
space)

~~~
feanaro
You can create your own rooms (which are like IRC channels) which can be
invite-only.

The counterpart to Slack workspaces/"servers" would be Matrix communities.
They allow you to group a bunch of rooms and users together for
discoverability. The feature exists today and is usable but still not as
polished as one would hope for, but I think work on this is coming up soon.

In particular, I think better community front pages (describing the community,
supplying related URLs and such) and access control (such the ability to
restrict joins to community rooms to community members without having to
invite each user to the room separately) are things that will be worked on.

------
Plyphon_
In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite
likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability,
improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc.

You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer
(If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds
WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs.

I guess my point is - I'd wager this wasn't "rail roaded" through by some
senior stakeholder that no-one can speak up too, but was probably a decision
made by a product team who have the data to back up their decisions.

Now if the above isn't true (and perhaps the opposite is true) - then agreed,
those are the signs it's time to leave.

~~~
greggman2
> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear
> desirability, improved value to user, improved usability

I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was
always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's
opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer
test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design based on
the test.

Has any one else?

To be clear I have seen a designer test themselves and re-design but I've
never seen them test with users and re-design. I've also seen them change a
design, put it out in limited release, then claim "we didn't get any/many
complaints so it must be okay" without a thought that the majority of users
never complain (either don't know how, can't be bothered, never considered it
might be useful, clicked the feedback but that doesn't actually make it back
to the designer, combinations of all of the above)

~~~
arrrg
That’s shocking that you have never seen this.

I agree that there is a temptation to not do it, especially for smaller
changes, especially if time is tight, especially if you are a smaller company,
and all of that is certainly a problem.

But no user testing? Not changing the design? We just recently drastically
changed the design of a new product we are developing because it failed
initial user testing (with clients of us who came in for user testing using a
paper prototype).

What followed were also several rounds of design critique sessions with the
revised design (bringing in internal people who had nothing to do with the
design and ask them for their constructive feedback, without aiming to find a
solution to what they find during that meeting) and we will bring those
original clients back in in December and sit them in front of the then working
prototype.

We are a small company and I do agree that we do this far too infrequently but
from my viewpoint as someone who makes the design I couldn’t even imagine not
reacting to people who clearly have trouble with the design. Because I did the
design. I know that it’s made of thousands of little decisions, thousands of
little trade-offs you have to make. I know that it’s a hard problem and that
it’s easy to make mistakes or to fundamentally misunderstand something about
the mental model the users have. So any information about what works and what
doesn’t is extremely valuable.

~~~
masukomi
> But no user testing? Not changing the design? We just recently drastically
> changed the design of a new product we are developing because it failed
> initial user testing (with clients of us who came in for user testing using
> a paper prototype).

your company is the exception. Most companies do no user testing. The closest
i came was working at a co that did user interviews and ran some mock-ups by
them before turning to eng. Once it was in our hands there was no change based
on user feedback, because there was no user feedback before release. Not
because we weren't willing to, but because ... they just never did.

Most folks i've spoken to do no user testing whatsoever at their companies.

------
StavrosK
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started
using it instead of Slack, and it has been _amazing_. It's fast, everything is
designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is
second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms.

I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a
nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-host.

~~~
nh2
What's keeping me on Slack instead of Zulip is its inability to mark messages
as unread [1] (Alt+Click on Slack).

I think that's critical for a communication app when you want to ensure that
you've answered all things that need answering.

[1]
[https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/2676](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/2676)

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's one thing I'm currently missing in Ripcord (the Slack client). Or at
least I haven't figured out how to do it. I use Slack from three devices, and
sometimes I read a message I want to reply to later from a different device -
marking messages as unread was a handy way for ensuring I don't lose them.

------
ninkendo
Did Slack ship a buggier version of this yesterday? I have it on one of my
workspaces, and it's _fine_.

I can still type `backticks` in the editor, with the exact same combinations
of keystrokes I used before, it's just that they render as they will on the
channel, rather than showing me the backticks (and only when I type the
closing backtick. GIF here:
[https://i.imgur.com/o3wPWN0.gif](https://i.imgur.com/o3wPWN0.gif))

Triple backtick does the same, and I can easily type another triple backtick
to exit the code block, same as before. It's literally _identical_ ergonomics
to the previous editor, except it's showing me the formatting I can expect.

I have to think that maybe they issued some hotfixes to the wysiwyg editor in
the past 24 hours to some workspaces? Or people are just _way_ too up in arms
about something that has literally no impact other than maybe some wasted
screen real estate showing formatting buttons...

~~~
jonahx
Many edge cases are different.

To name one: You realize after finishing your code block that the first two
lines of it actually shouldn't have been part of the code block, but should
have been normal text above.

Go ahead and try to make this change with the new system.

Compare that to what you would have done with the old, plain-text system.

~~~
avdempsey
Sure enough, the rich text formatting is copied. The workaround I have for
this is the Get Plain Text app. It strips all formatting from copied text
(either automatically or on a keyboard shortcut). Sad it's required for this
use case. But at least this works.

~~~
moe
It wasn't required a day ago.

Slack can't seriously expect us to apply clumsy workarounds to their single
most important feature (text-entry) that many of us use hundreds of times per
day.

In particular since the solution is as trivial as adding an off-switch.

------
chx
The exact same happened with the draft feature. The importance of habit
forming UI is very well documented, going back at least as far as Jef Raskin's
The Humane Interface and the draft feature completely breaks it -- if you as
much as accidentally leave a character in there, you can't find the channel/DM
at its normal place. Despite repeated calls to make it optional, nothing.

Threads are also broken, has always been. For example, if you get a
notification in mail and it's in a thread, you can't jump to it, clicking the
link dumps you into the channel and you are left wondering. Previously (as in,
going back at least to '90 or so with IRC) you were able to skim the entirety
of discussion in backscroll, now you'd need to open every thread on its own.
As a senior developer, this was tremendously helpful to everyone because I
could just skim a larger batch of discussions at a time and give some advice
later as needed. Both of these problems could be solved if threads could be
opened, you know, thread style into the channel. But... no. Also, if you
answer in the special "threads" view then you will need to click the new
answers link every time someone answers. It's terrible UX.

It used to be that adding a text snippet was right in the "add" menu you
opened on the right hand side of the text, now it's in a submenu, seriously
slowing down creating one. The menu wasn't getting large at all, no reason to
do this.

It's very strange, they are the top dog, with immense inertia but it doesn't
mean a younger, more eager, better UX, slimmer chat won't replace them. Digg
to Reddit, remember? Until then, does anyone want to write a "Better Slack"
collection of scripts injected into the app? I pledge 20 USD to fix these
three problems, anyone else?

~~~
city41
The draft feature positively boggles my mind. The intention seems to be to
collect all your drafts into one location. But that comes with the assumption
people will have multiple drafts for ... chat channels? Do people really work
that way?

If the actual intention is to remind you you have a half written message,
seems some kind of indicator on the channel would suffice. Having my channel
“disappear” on me is maddening.

~~~
baddox
It’s so simple. They could add the channel/DM to the Drafts list while also
keeping it in its normal spot. I cringe with sympathetic embarrassment just
thinking about how ridiculously obvious this is and how easy it would be to
implement.

~~~
chx
Hold on, if you have a dict like structure with the channels as keys then no,
implementing that is not so easy.

------
janwh
I want to encourage everyone who doesn't like the WYSIWYG input box to use
`/feedback` directly from within Slack to let the folks over there know about
it. I believe this is one of those occasions in which tons of user feedback is
crucial to at least make that awful thing optional.

~~~
aashcan
Just wrote in,

    
    
      Thanks for sharing your experience with our new formatting UI. I'm sorry to hear it's been a little disruptive so far.
      There isn't a way to revert to the old formatting method, I'm afraid. 
      We don't currently have plans to make the new formatting configurable 
      though we are carefully considering all our customers' feedback.

~~~
dajonker
Got the same message. Let's see if "carefully considering all our customers'
feedback" means "hey, lots of people are annoyed by this" or "ignoring all our
customers' feedback".

------
userbinator
I suppose a new acronym would be suitable for this situation: WYSIWYGBNWYW,
What You See Is What You Get But Not What You Want.

With the availability of detailed API documentation
([https://api.slack.com](https://api.slack.com) ) that seems to make it
relatively easy to write your own client (and they even link to some
thirdparty clients as an example of what you can do), their refusal to change
could almost be interpreted as "no, you fix it".

If I had the need and time, I could probably write a native Win32 Slack client
in a very short time; in fact I'm a bit surprised that one hasn't appeared yet
because I was expecting that to happen. Maybe it will, if they keep messing
around with the official client.

~~~
samatman
Back in ye olde days, we'd call this WYGIWYS.

------
jakebasile
Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something
specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure
of how correct their vision of a chat service should be.

This one in particular[1]:

> The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a
> pain.

"Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious
vision we have you will thank us."

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1192147475672510474?s=21](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1192147475672510474?s=21)

~~~
danShumway
> The goal is for workflows to evolve

This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely
practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to
put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs.

Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional
fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a
new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it
in the trash.

But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no
discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets
professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate
software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's
tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact
with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time
you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.

In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because
they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist,
changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields,
it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very
specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain
constant for years and years.

Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools
should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software
would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build
up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers
and I didn't need to _think_ about the way I typed -- only in software would
that be considered a bad thing.

~~~
ben_jones
Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I've been developing an internal
CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But
while it is somewhat depressing, I'm left with questions about how bad it
really is.

First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business
users with temporary (let's assume the ultimate products are better then the
linux/vim/emacs they are superseding) regressions and inconveniences? And what
is the cost in terms of time to route around such pitfalls? Would we still be
able to have startups at all if products required thousands of hours of QA or
perfect test suites in order to launch?

Second, if we were to set a hard rule 20 years ago that all software was to
avoid this phenomenon during its development, what valuable tools and services
would never have been developed at all? Would we still have Twitter? Reddit?
Steam? Whatsapp? I don't have to dig far into the history of any of those
tools to find near revolutions by their userbases over braindead UI or
adversarial practices in the name of "vision".

I don't know, these are open questions. I just think avoiding all such
frustrations you mentioned is wishful thinking and at some point it is just
part of the process of experimentation and iteration. Or perhaps this process
is entirely different in a small corp. versus a big corp. environment.

~~~
Kalium
> Would we still have Twitter? Reddit? Steam? Whatsapp?

How many of those _broke_ old workflows to introduce new ones with no clear
benefits?

But that's not the point. We're not talking here about broad services like
Reddit, Twitter, or Steam. We're talking about something more akin to a
libary. You shouldn't break interfaces in a library without a strong,
compelling reason.

Do things need to change eventually? Absolutely. Do they need to change today,
because someone decided that the old workflows they don't like need to break
for everyone? Maybe not. There's perhaps some room between the two.

It's been my experience that business software often represents a deep
investment in a given workflow. Sometimes to the point where businesses are
willing to spend a great deal of money to preserve those workflows and
integrate new things into them - MuleSoft springs to mind.

Which is not to say that you're wrong. It's _absolutely_ possible to develop
new, improved software that's better in critical ways. Sometimes people and
businesses are willing to put up with temporary regressions and inconveniences
to gain substantial improvements. To use the above comparison, I've seen
artists invest the time in learning how to draw all over again in order to
jump from paper to digital.

What Slack has done is take away what was a perfectly functional workflow for
many people. This doesn't look like a temporary regression or inconvenience.
This looks like a permanent, hard break without substantial obvious benefits
for people who used the old workflow. Communicating with users in a way that
telegraphs very clearly that Slack doesn't care at all is just gilding the
lily.

~~~
aprdm
That's a place where the benefits of open source and hosting your own stuff
pay off.

I can stay in older functional versions for a long time without being forced
to upgrade and disrupt everyone's workflow because someone in a company
thought they knew better how we should work.

Jenkins, Gitlab, rocketchat, review board all open source tools that you can
be running years old ( on an isolated network please ) without upgrading and
being very functional...

------
Jestar342
It is infuriatingly terrible. A regression. So many times I've had similar
woes with the code block and quote block mechanisms too.

Another truly bizarre feature I noted and sent a bug report about was that
when adding an image to an "Action" the _minimum_ size requirement is 512px by
512px. For an image that is never rendered larger than 64x64.

~~~
gregmac
The changing behaviour of enter/shift+enter in code block drives me absolutely
crazy.

Normally, shift+enter is newline, enter is send. However, inside a code block,
it's the opposite. I _constantly_ forget this and press shift+enter for a
newline while in the code block and accidentally send a half-finished message.

Sad to see the new WYSIWYG editor does exactly the same thing.

~~~
tln
I'm not seeing this behavior. Are you sure you don't have a setting changed?
Under Preferences > Advanced,

When typing code with ```, Enter should not send the message. With this
checked use ShiftEnter to send.

Might be an easy fix :)

~~~
gregmac
What can I say but... _THANK YOU!_

I definitely don't remember ever seeing or changing that setting, but it is
1000 times better with it off. Guess it's worth looking through an app's
settings every once in a while, no matter how long you've been using it, just
to see if there's anything new (or maybe forgotten) that would improve things
for you.

------
sambe
This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and
learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop
using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all
text input. Don't break text input dummy!

~~~
bishalb
While I understand why this change can be annoying to the tech savvy folks of
hackernews, it can be quite helpful for those who aren't that tech savvy and
want easy ways to bold, italicize texts (that make up majority of the slack
user base). Heck I am sure most of the slack users wouldn't even know it was
possible to bold, italicize on slack using markdown.

~~~
lucideer
Why does anyone (tech savvy or otherwise) _need_ to bold or italicize
anything.

In my mind bolding/italicizing are nice-to-haves alongside emoji. You wouldn't
compromise the entire functional user experience of the central feature of
your app for nicer emojis. (at least I hope not).

~~~
eternalny1
You literally just italicized "need", and I read it the way you intended it.

That's why tech people italicize stuff.

~~~
lucideer
Please reread my comment. Italicising is, as I said, a _nice-to-have_. I did
not _need_ to italicise need; it's an optional extra in my comment, but I can
still communicate effectively without it.

Or, as your reply has highlighted, even _with_ the additional emphasis, people
will still fail to read it the way it was intended.

------
StefanKarpinski
Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just
similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical
users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for
technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional
and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can
understand that changing the formatting on people previously would have been
disruptive, but that is no longer a viable excuse: you have already disrupted
the lives of programmers far worse than changing to CommonMark would have done
and switching markup formats won’t affect people who stay in wysiwyg mode at
all. If you reintroduce Markdown mode now using CommonMark, programmers will
just be happy that they can use Slack effectively again and as a bonus, you’ll
match GitHub and everywhere else programmers hang out.

Regarding Slack’s attitude about technical users whose life this disrupts, I
can see that the calculus may appear to favor the non-technical users: there
are probably far more users who have no idea what Markdown is and never need
to share code snippets on Slack and who are happy with the new wysiwyg editor
since it’s closer to what they get from MS Word and Gmail. However, technical
users have massively outsized influence over the choices of technology at most
companies. The IT dept is full of technical users who share code fragments all
the time. Don’t you think they’ll be keeping an eye out for new chat platforms
after this change? Tech startups are (almost by definition) mostly technical
users. Do you think any new tech startups will willingly use Slack after this
change? Some of those would have been paying customers and a few of them would
have become huge paying customers. Now they won’t. I know I’m actively looking
for alternatives now and I have controlling influence over what gets used in
several paying and non-paying Slack instances.

~~~
ako
Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user
group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers,
the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably
not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase
revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product
management.

~~~
nizmow
Sadly I think this is just another case of product adoption largely being
driven by techies in the early stages because they loved it, and later in its
growth stages realising their market is now way more mainstream and designing
their features as such. And now we're alienated by the same product we helped
spread.

Twitter is another obvious example I can think of.

~~~
ako
Yes, and most of us would do the same thing running a product, if it means
more profits. Optimizing for Shareholder value...

~~~
TeMPOraL
What happened to self-respect and the desire to provide a quality profit that
makes people's life better?

~~~
ako
Nothing to do with self respect This is a completely accepted and promoted way
of growing your product. See for example the strategies outlined in “crossing
the chasm”. Techies are in this case the early adopters, and now that slack
has crossed the chasm, they are targeting a completely new user group, the
early adopters, with a new set of needs and wants.

Time to move to a new product which still focuses on techies.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Until that new product "crosses the chasm" too?

As a member of user minorities - the "tech savvy" niche and "knows software
can be ergonomic, and expects that" niche - I'm already avoiding using new
"innovative" products. The story is always the same - people with needs are
used as tools to drive initial adoption, and then the product self-destructs
trying to chase the lowest common denominator.

FWIW, I wouldn't even be using Slack if I weren't forced to, like probably
most of its users. Regular employees don't have much say in what companies use
for chat, nor do most people in communities in what tool was used to start
them.

------
rdhatt
You can submit feedback to Slack using "/feedback" command. The nice thing it
appears they have real people give you real replies. I encourage people to use
it.

I asked them for the option to turn it off. An excerpt from their response.

> ... we understand that this has caused a disruption in workflows for some of
> our more technical users. While we don't have any active plans to make this
> configurable at the moment, we are in the process of collecting user
> feedback so that we can find a way to make it work for everyone.

I'll be sending this as my follow-up.

~~~
adrianmonk
There are definitely several things that I don't like about Slack, but their
support has been very responsive. I've reported at least two issues, and they
have always taken my input seriously.

A while back, I reported a bug with copy/paste, and they asked questions,
acknowledged it, and had it fixed by the next release.

More recently, I had a question about why the UI behaves in a certain way I
didn't expect, and they took the time to explain that it was intentional, and
what their reasoning was for doing it their way instead of how I expected.

All of these experiences are way better than average for our industry, which
in my experience usually just brushes you off without trying to understand
your issue and tries to placate you with a non-answer or answer to something
other than what you asked.

~~~
trca
I agree. Usually Slack's support is wonderful. But with this awful WYSIWYG
input debacle, their support has been... subpar. A whole lot of non-answers
and dismissive "we're collecting user feedback".

------
3leggedcatman
Yes. Its crap, but telling them so will achieve nothing (management obviously
think its wonderful).

I'd love to know whose idea it was, though. Maybe next time you could try
congratulating them on "clever self-disruption of a successful product" or
something similar to draw them out into the open.

The journey from hacker-friendly comms tool to mainstream train wreck must be
quite a story.

------
ncmncm
Slack's _everything_ is terrible.

At MongoDB, we were supposed to be on it at all times. It was a continuous
source of stress and broken concentration. It is what I left behind most
eagerly.

Curiously, Google Chat has not become similarly stress-inducing. Yet. Gmail
has become moreso lately, though. At least once a week it manages to conceal
an important message.

Since Google Chat works, I expect them to drop it soon.

~~~
freedomben
Google Chat is quite stress-inducing for me as well. Maybe I don't know how to
use it properly, but when I get a notification it is so hard for me to find
the message that triggered it. Our Google Chat has a lot of messages, so
sometimes I could have to scroll through hundreds of messages and thread to
find it. It's not highlighted or anything to make it easy, either.

Because I often can't find the message that pinged me, it's extremely
stressful. I worry people think I ignored them, when in reality I never saw
their message, despite actively looking for it.

~~~
ncmncm
At my office, we have mostly only individual chats, plus a customer-crisis
chat ("Who's helping XYZ?" "On it"). So if there is any activity, it is
relevant, and it actually reduces interruptions, because when we're deep in
something, we don't look, and somebody with a question doesn't need to hang
about waiting.

------
harshalizee
I wish Enterprise software or anything where I have to pay money to use had
strict contracts about changes and mandatory opt-ins. It's ridiculous that in
this day and age, we have to be worried about some PM deciding for large
swathes of users what's best for them. I just want my tools to be predictable
and usable and not have to relearn every bit of quirk someone fancied.

~~~
will_pseudonym
And it's insanely myopic that software companies don't understand that
stability and predictability is a feature you best not mess with when it comes
to _tools_.

------
exogeny
I'm going to take the opposite of this argument, and for bonafides, I run the
product team for a 1000+ person company. I'm going to assume that this thing
was tested out the wazoo, both qualitatively and behind enough feature-flags
and buckets to keep Optimizely in business for a year. So I have no doubt that
this wasn't just a hunch on their part, but something that they meticulously
tracked. If I'm wrong, definitely let me know.

Anyway, the main point, what percentage of people do we think knows markdown
to such an extent where it's easier for them to use than a WYSIWYG editor
would be? I'd venture on HN alone that number is <10%, and considering Slack
is used by a far wider and less-savvy audience than on here, I don't have much
of a problem with the reasoning behind the change.

I think the lack of backwards-compatibility is a legit criticism, and sure, an
opt-out would be nice, but I don't think for a second that this is as
egregious as people are making it out to be.

~~~
rmsaksida
As someone who runs the product team for a 1000+ person company, the concept
of intransigent minorities should be of interest to you. [1]

The gist of it is that an intransigent minority can often dictate the choices
of a flexible majority. It is unwise to make decisions based solely on
majority rule, as stubborn minorities can affect complex systems in ways that
you do not expect. The phenomenon can be verified in a variety of situations
across history.

To put this into context for Slack, I believe technical users have been
particularly important for the app. Tech users were early adopters for Slack -
I'm sure a lot of corporate accounts started out with engineering teams. Tech
users wrote the chat bots and integrations that Slack is known for. They got
people to use Slack, and they can get people to stop using it.

Let's say you're changing the way a certain feature in your application works.
The majority of users are happy or indifferent about the change (but weren't
particularly bothered by the old behaviour). A minority of users not only
reject the change, but are vocal in how much they hate it. They will not
tolerate the new behaviour, and will try to get other users to abandon your
product unless you resolve the situation. What do you do? You can ignore them
for now, but can you predict the long term effects of turning your back to the
intransigent minority?

1\. [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-
dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-
of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

~~~
wpietri
And I'd add that inclusion is especially important for a tool that's supposed
to connect everybody in the company. Thinking that one can ignore a chunk of
the audience because they have no choice but to keep using your product is at
best confused, and at worse displaying enormous arrogance. It's the sort of
enterprise-grade nonsense that Slack was initially seen as an antidote to.

I get that things that want to be popular quite often shiv the early adopters
as they become mainstream, as a) that particular orange has been well juiced,
and b) satisfying early-adopter needs really can get in the way of that holy
grail, maximizing revenue.

But here I don't think there's a big conflict. There are a bunch of ways this
could have been done to make everybody happy. It could have been opt-in for a
while and then opt out. Or as others point out, there are apparently good
WYSIWYG experiences already out there. With a market cap of $12 billion, Slack
could afford to buy one, or at least the team behind it.

The only explanation I see is that it was rushed out the door to meet some
executive's goals. Which suggests that Slack is becoming the sort of clueless,
sales-driven, user-contemptuous company the initially aimed to overthrow.

------
WatchDog
Since moving companies, I have traded slack for microsoft teams. Teams is
pretty terrible in comparison, one of the most annoying "features" is it's
WYSIWYG editor, I have no idea why slack would want to copy one of the worst
elements about teams.

~~~
Aeolun
Because teams is eating their lunch by virtue of being included in Office 365,
and they misinterpret it as being due to their WYSIWYG editor?

------
xfitm3
Fuck slack. They're hostile to user choice and preferences, pushing a one-
size-fits all attitude. Communication preferences are extremely personal and
must be respected.

I have a custom ssl proxy to intercept slack.com and modify their api,
eliminating what I believe to be dark patterns. Some things I do:

* Force dark mode always

* Disable favicon.ico updating when there are notifications in DnD

* Group channels based on name prefix (stealing behavior from an add-on)

* Ignore bots

It's hard to keep this up to date so it's not really that robust. If I open
source it I know I'll get legal pressure from slack, not to mention they'll
probably try to block it.

~~~
dfsegoat
I’m just curious about the ssl proxy + api modification part in general - got
a ref for that for a more mundane application?

~~~
xfitm3
I'm using something I wrote for work. Basic steps:

\- Create and trust a CA

\- Issue SSL for api.slack.com

\- Deploy something like [https://github.com/chimurai/http-proxy-
middleware/issues/97](https://github.com/chimurai/http-proxy-
middleware/issues/97) with your code to modify the response body

\- Strip HPKP headers, if present

\- Strip CAA in DNS, if present

------
Ensorceled
What is currently driving me crazy about slack is that:

1) Slack constantly makes subtle changes the UX that always takes a bit of
time to figure out, I don't want to read update notes to find out how a
critical comms tool has changed eg. yesterday the mac chat became psuedo
wysiwhg and it broke my muscle memory and stuff bounces around while I'm
typing, eg2. Drafts: FU, I didn't ask for you to reorder my UI around so I
can't find stuff, DON"T CHANGE MY MENUS

2) Bugs, I left hipchat because they couldn't stop breaking stuff with every
update. Many of Slack's changes are "breaking stuff" until you figure out what
they've changed.

~~~
matthuggins
Ugh, I can't stand the menu reordering for drafts!

~~~
Ensorceled
All they needed was a highlight or an asterisk or something similar.

~~~
pyridines
It wasn't always this way. There used to be a pencil icon next to the
person/channel you had a draft in.

~~~
Ensorceled
Right! Thanks for the reminder. I don't understand why drafts weren't just a
list of links to the draft and LEAVE the original channels where I explicitly
put them when I was curating my channels.

------
leipert
Just a side note: They never have supported markdown. It just markdown-like or
a very limited subset of markdown.

Especially proper list support is missing (ordered and unordered lists), also
markdown links.

~~~
codazoda
Yeah, I've always hoped they would change their position on supporting
markdown. Their big report on it says they will never support it. Looks like
this might be why.

------
savingGrace
After reading this post, I don't really know what this new feature is. I'm
part of the 'enterprise' crowd and we tend to lag behind in 'features'. I do
know about Slack's 'deal with it' attitude, though.

When the new 'draft' feature came out I desperately wanted to turn it off(I
really hate it). I opened a support ticket and spoke with one of their team
members. I basically got an "It's what our customers want" kind of reply. I am
the customer. Why can I not disable/enable it in an options menu somewhere?

This post says it all: 'If you prefer the old interface… well, screw you, says
Slack. ... I wish Slack would provide a way to disable the WYSIWYG rich-text-
input box. I don’t think it’s useful, and it’s extremely annoying...'

I miss IRC.

------
mijoharas
I tried speaking to support to find out if I could downgrade, some of my
colleagues don't have this feature. They couldn't(/wouldn't) tell me how to.

One thing that isn't mentioned is the behaviour with pressing up to edit a
previous comment, it will put you into the span if the span goes to the end of
the message.

I've also had numerous times where the span hasn't closed correctly leading to
things in backticks not being formatted correctly (I'm guessing timing issue
due to their move to react for this stuff).

It's incredibly annoying. If I didn't have to use slack for work I'd probably
bin it.

------
igetspam
Someone has supplied a fix: [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet)

~~~
spurgu
Wow thank you so much, both to you and the author. Can confirm it works as
advertised!

Please upvote parent to the top!!

------
ksml
I want to chime in with one editor that I think nailed a markdown WYSIWYG:
[https://www.typora.io/](https://www.typora.io/)

It's hard to explain the concept with just words, but I will try: While you're
typing, markdown is fully exposed, but when you move the cursor away, the
formatting characters disappear and you just see pretty formatted text. As
soon as you move the cursor back to the formatted text, the markdown reappears
so you can edit the plain markdown syntax.

I've been using this editor for two years and I think the developers were
really clever in this implementation; I've never experienced any unexpected
issues. Slack, on the other hand, has been driving me absolutely crazy. (Try
changing an inline code block after you've created it. Easy in Typora, a
nightmare in slack.)

~~~
shrimpx
I just tried typora. One gotcha is say I'm in a triple backtick code block and
you accidentally start typing the next non-code paragraph in the code block.
There seems to be no way to end the code block (eg the equivalent of typing
the ending triple backtick somewhere) without deleting the trailing text
accidentally added to the code block.

------
LilBytes
The specific example shown in the attached article works fine for me in Slack
with the updated editor.

``` when you do `foo()` it foos the bar. ```

Looks fine for me? Only the `foo()` is highlighted, not the entire line as
shown. Have they pushed out a fix for this already?

~~~
tarikozket
it works for me too. I'm confused...

~~~
LilBytes
I can only assume it's been fixed then???

Perhaps this is mostly hyperbole to change. I mean, Markdown is amazing. But
as stated it was only a `lite` implementation of the editor.

The new editor seems fine for me so far, though I'll gladly be proven wrong.

------
llampx
I've given up entirely on the Slack desktop app and use Ripcord exclusively.
Much faster, more responsive and easier to use for 99% of my time spent on
slack.

~~~
therealmarv
How is voice chat on Slack working in Ripcord? I'm guessing not at all?

~~~
stuartd
Under "Features" it says it's a WIP (so yes, probably not working at all):

> Voice chat (Discord OK, Slack WIP)

It also lists this 'feature' which I think is hilarious:

> Not made from a web browser

------
njharman
I've found "developers", people who work extensively with plain text and mark
up languages, mostly hate WYSIWYG. Because it just gets in the way of / works
differently than the skills/knowledge they already have.

I presume people who primarily work in Word/OpenOffice/Whatever Apples thing
is, feel the opposite.

If your customers include both, UI is basically impossible to get right for
everyone.

~~~
bradstewart
Why wouldn't they make this optional? Then everybody gets we they want.

~~~
b3kart
Exactly. How hard can that be. It’s almost like they’re on a mission to piss
off their technical users.

------
trynewideas
If they didn't care what designers thought when they shipped a new logo
featuring a colorful pinwheel of erect, stubby penises and dangling testicles,
then they won't care what users think when they deploy the equivalent feature.

~~~
trynewideas
Also, I don't know what anyone expected from a company that looked at HipChat
and thought, yeah, let's buy _that_.

~~~
geitir
Probably just a bartering chip for better jira integration

------
themattress
Glad I'm not the only one.

I never had a problem with formatting code in slack until this release. And
the hotkey (Shit+Cmd+C) doesn't work for me, although that might be my window
manager interfering.

~~~
takeda
I guess they reach point where they are trying to improve something that was
already good enough.

For me most annoying is that they removed setting that allowed me to configure
to have up arrow to repeat the last command (like on IRC) this is very useful
if you do ChatOps.

------
hn_throwaway_99
To be fair, at least one of the most annoying features reported in the blog
post (not respecting closing backticks) appears to be fixed, at least for me.

But in general I agree with the sentiment that this feature should have been
easy to make optional (none of the underlying data changes, it's just a UI
control), so I think Slack deserves the scorn for this one.

Related, rhe absolute one saving grace feature that I commend reddit for is
old.reddit.com. It may be "ugly", but it also lets me be extremely fast when
browsing (not a ton of extraneous whitespace like I can't stand in the new
interface). IMO lots of "designer-led redesigns" killed many a previous chat
forum (looking at you Slashdot). A common thread is many of these redesigns
are built to appeal to a less expert-level user. But by doing this in a way
that is not optional, you are guaranteed to piss off the folks who are the
biggest users of your product. It is no wonder they are vocal!

------
ilrwbwrkhv
lol product managers are such a bane for tech companies. they have to keep
shipping features which no ones wants but they have to show they came up with
and are shipping something. i think tech companies should try and avoid
product managers and designers for as long as possible.

~~~
bovermyer
This sounds like you've never had a good one.

A _good_ product manager can make a world of difference.

~~~
Aeolun
The only times I’ve had semi-decent product managers was when I was
consulting, and they were paying our company for every hour worked.

------
beshrkayali
I'm glad they're walking back on this.

But in general, I'm noticing more and more that some product and UX designers
seem to be trying to pass utterly broken stuff as "oh you're just not used to
it yet" type of thing, which is extremely annoying. People have been
explaining the EXACT problem to Slack on Twitter since Nov 7, and they clearly
said that "we don't want that" many times in the thread.

It's not the wrong decision in rolling this out with no opt-out that is the
problem, it's the fucking insistince on "no it's just all the thousands of you
complaining, and not us" that gets me. And they had many opportunities to
admit this.

------
Sholmesy
I feel like a grumpy man yelling about updates like this, but this has been
really badly done. Why oh why does it compromise on the existing "power" users
usage so that it can provide click boxes for people who will never use it...

------
dajonker
This being on top of Hacker News with 600+ comments at the time of writing
means that Slack flushed millions of dollars worth of developer productivity
down the toilet (i.e. all the people spending time complaining about Slack
here).

------
tootie
Not exactly the same thing but GChat used to have a mini drawing UI where you
could send a quick doodle and it super useful. No one else seems to have
picked up on it.

------
jmull
I feel so blissfully privileged every time Slack comes up here.

Somehow using Slack has never come up in my life. I'm sure not looking forward
to it.

(Though I do know the pain of having to use some frustratingly crappy-ass
software because working with a client or for an employer makes it non-
optional. Come to think of it, I've done my time.)

------
dimonomid
Meanwhile here's a real way to disable it right now:
[https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet/](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet/)

Thanks a lot to Kevin for sharing that, you're savior.

------
hyperdimension
You know, I can't stand re-designs, and I was agreeing with a lot of the
comments here until I got off my phone and was able to click through to the
article and to Twitter on my laptop.

The responses _are_ kind of repetitive/grating in that they're non-replies and
kind of stonewalling, but I couldn't help but picture some poor soul fighting
against the gratuitous negativity. Some (Most?) people were being
constructively negative, which I do appreciate, but the Slack employee on
Twitter essentially can't give anyone any closure or solution, and is just
generally powerless against the whims of the designers or whoever it was that
pushed for this change.

I like all my tools just so and have gotten used to them over many years, so I
definitely agree with a lot of the sentiment here. It's just that for some
reason the human sitting on the other side of the Twitter account was
'visible' to me in this instance.

EDIT: just to say that for the above reason, comments like this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590681)

make me a little sad. It's one thing to rail on a company, but in the case of
Twitter, it's another person. Maybe a team of people; I'm not sure, but I'd
say the same in that case too.

------
apetresc
Using wee-slack instead of the official Slack client is an easy win on
multiple levels, including this one. I sincerely hope they never go out of
their way to break/block it.

~~~
slimed
Please don't post about this here

~~~
apetresc
Huh? Why not? It seems completely relevant.

~~~
slimed
It's also relevant to those who would take it away. Widespread adoption will
compel them to break it.

~~~
apetresc
They're obviously aware of it. The #1 contributor to the project, both by
commits and by LoC, works at Slack.

~~~
slimed
And as long as too many people aren't using it over the core product, they'll
allow it to exist.

------
tylerjwilk00
Same old story.

Developer focused tool becomes mainstream.

Suites come in to maximize profit, engagement, in-app usages.

Early adopters leave looking for new developer focused tool.

Can't wait until slack gets snapchatitized features so I can put a cool filter
and sticker on the code block messages in #devs

------
social_quotient
Here is a link for some additional context

[https://slack.com/help/articles/202288908-format-your-
messag...](https://slack.com/help/articles/202288908-format-your-messages)

And

[https://api.slack.com/changelog/2019-09-what-they-see-is-
wha...](https://api.slack.com/changelog/2019-09-what-they-see-is-what-you-get-
and-more-and-less)

~~~
Seb-C
Another annoying and broken design decision: because I live in Japan the first
link redirects me automatically to the Japanese version of the article. There
is no option to choose the language, and manually changing the language-code
in the URL still redirects me to the Japanese version. My browser is set to
English and French as main languages...

------
emlun
Someone made a bookmarklet to disable it: [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-
disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet)

------
jonstewart
Hell yes, it’s awful. I am going to convey to Slack tomorrow I will cancel our
account if they don’t fix it in a reasonable timeframe. For my dev team I t
has gone from a valuable tool to actively harmful, overnight.

------
scott_paul
Your user experience has been "enhanced".

Share and Enjoy.

------
jrochkind1
YES IT IS. I literally am not able to enter some things, like a `>` quote
followed by a line that is NOT a quote.

~~~
coldtea
There is a workaround for this which works quite well. Press the down arrow
1-2 times, and you escape the quoted context.

~~~
codyb
The problem here is that generally the arrow keys are in awkward positions
unfortunately.

------
yellowapple
I went ahead and tried to reproduce the article's observations.

> when you do `foo()` it foos the bar.

I typed this exact sequence of characters in the new editor and it formatted
exactly as one would expect.

> when you do bar.`foo()` it foos the bar

I was indeed able to reproduce this, and worse: if you put the cursor after
the f, delete it, and type f again, the new f will happen before the
backticks. One can tell this is about to happen by observing the cursor; even
though the cursor is over the little box, it's black (as in for normal text)
instead of red/salmon/whatever-that-color-is (as in for code).

That said, one can work around this by selecting all the text to be backtick'd
and clicking the </> button (or pressing Ctrl-Shift-C); annoying, but slightly
less annoying than having to retype things.

------
loriverkutya
"Thanks so much for the feedback here, we really appreciate it and I'm sorry
that the new formatting options have disrupted your flow. There isn't a way to
revert to the old formatting method, I'm afraid. We don't currently have plans
to make the new formatting configurable though we are carefully considering
all our customers' feedback.

If it helps, you can turn off the formatting toolbar by clicking the Aa symbol
to the right of the message input field.

The new message formatting is in the initial stages of launch and we're
definitely planning on keeping it updated and making changes that make sense
to us within the vision of the product."

I really sad to see when a "vision" is more important for a company than the
customer feedback.

------
alexghr
A work colleague recommended this alternative Slack client
[https://cancel.fm/ripcord/](https://cancel.fm/ripcord/)

(I'm not affiliated with this project in any way, just thought the HN audience
might find it useful)

------
p0cc
I made a firefox/chrome extension [1] based on Kevin Hafy's script [2].

Firefox Addon: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-
slack...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-slack-
wysiwyg/) Chrome Extn: Pending Review

Per Sean0-'s comment, it looks like this might not be necessary though.

Edited: formatting

[1]: [https://github.com/pocc/no-wysiwyg](https://github.com/pocc/no-wysiwyg)
[2]: [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet)

------
neonate
I really dislike it as well. It puts designeyness right in my face in a way
that interferes with my use of the tool. The old way was just fine.

------
mathw
I went to a Slack workspace I'm in which has had WYSIWYG editing turned on and
the first assertion in the article - about the non-closing backticks - isn't
true. Since they turned it on last week I've had no issues with anything at
all like this - I just type exactly what I would have typed before and it
formats correctly every time.

Dealing with quotes is better, even.

Now I didn't need any of this, but it doesn't get in my way at all. In that
regard they've done a far better job than Visual Studio, which I just can't
seem to persuade not to insert random nonsense from time to time when it
thinks it's being "helpful".

------
oerpli
Same for Teams. Based on what I've heard I thought I will like it but the
input box ruined it for me. It's beyond pathetic how a company the size of MS
cannot implement a text-box that outputs text how I want it more than 1 in 10
times.

While I agree that non-technical persons would not get Markdown, not a single
non-technical person ever messaged me something with markup. So why not just
disable the shitty WYSIWYG and make markdown-formatting a opt-in choice from
the sender of messages?

Also: Even Azure Dev Ops suffered from the same problem. I have no idea, how
the same company can produce VS (Code or full version) and then release junk
like this.

------
waynenilsen
This bookmarklet disables it on web [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-
wysiwyg-bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet)

------
l-p
There is a way to disable it via a bookmarklet:

[https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-
bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet)

~~~
MatekCopatek
Awesome, but looks like this relies on disabling A/B testing, so it will die
once they fully roll it out :(

------
marcoperaza
There is this long-standing bug on mobile versions of slack where large swaths
of messages just disappear. The only way to get them back is to sign out and
sign back in. This is supposed to replace business email?

~~~
bob1029
You know what largely replaced business email AND these crappy chat
applications for us? GitHub issue threads. We do a very large part of our
collaboration right next to the code now. Email & chat is now mostly to just
asynchronously notify regarding one or more issue numbers. Managers,
developers, everyone. If you want something discussed or handled, make an
issue. It's got a single numeric identifier that's trivial to pass around,
even to clients and end users. Labeling systems applied to issues can quickly
turn a messy bucket into a well-oiled software factory. If you use GitHub,
this is also a strong argument for a monorepo, as you could have 1 unique
identifier for anything across the entire org scope that also links into your
code contexts seamlessly.

The UX around GitHub must be incredible for non-developers, because I am
watching project managers with zero engineering/coding background learn
markdown syntax almost accidentally. In all of our time using GH issues as a
collaboration tool, I have heard exactly ZERO complaints regarding anything
being broken or unfriendly to use.

We now look back on Teams/Slack/Skype/Email usage as dark days. "How the hell
did we ever get anything done?" is the usual take when one of us talks about
it.

~~~
ncmncm
Know what's better than Github issues? A directory in the tree named Issues.
Create files there. They all stay with the project. Append comments to them.
Code snippets. What have you.

git grep finds them.

~~~
bob1029
This works great for developers, but your project managers and executives will
not enjoy this experience as much.

~~~
ncmncm
So much the better?

Github could have put all the issues into the same repository, and built on
top of that for the sake of managers, but that would make projects too
portable. Having important project metadata in their domain aids lock-in.

------
Myrmornis
On the plus side, maybe in a future update they'll make it so that we can do
```somelanguage and the box will have JS active with syntax highlighting and
tab indentation appropriate for <language>. Slack's thing hasn't seemed that
bad to me. It's true I've deleted a few stray back ticks, but it's so easy to
edit mistakes it's not that big a deal. Especially if you use both Jira and
Slack, the absolute shitness of Jira's issue text entry UI is a different
order of magnitude and Slack's input box seems fine.

------
rudolph9
I tweeted about this this morning.

[https://twitter.com/krudolph9/status/1197180483185995776?s=2...](https://twitter.com/krudolph9/status/1197180483185995776?s=21)

Here is a link to a reddit post. Please tell them this is obnoxious
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dmyn45/does_anyone_k...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dmyn45/does_anyone_know_how_to_get_rid_of_these_extra/)

------
jorblumesea
Imo, they've been on a roll lately when it comes to annoying designs. Drafts
now bubble up in the UI, so if you start a chat want to finish it, it's all
the way the top, regardless of where it started. Threads are similarly broken,
if you click on a thread link, it won't link to the new addition to the
conversation, just the entire thread. There's also weird bugs or possibly
design issues where in a thread, you have limited or not the same options as
you have in a general chat window.

------
cygned
Slack is at the point where we as long-term customers are wondering what they
are working on all day. In fact, we are actively looking for replacements.

We could stand this new editor (even though it’s annoying), but what really
drives us nuts are the performance issues on mobile, that there’s no way on
iOS to see a screen share or to share the screen and that Slack is not
integrated into the iOS call system. And when you have the pleasure to use it
on mobile, it always tells you that the connection is bad

------
hobofan
It is pretty astonishing how much Slack was able to grow from their initial 2
years of being ahead of the curve in UX, despite being mediocre/bad on every
other front since.

------
juretriglav
Recently wrote about how surprisingly computationally intensive typing in it
is ([https://juretriglav.si/what-happens-when-you-type-a-
single-l...](https://juretriglav.si/what-happens-when-you-type-a-single-
letter/)), so it’s doubly surprising that it also doesn’t work as expected.
But text editing on the web _is_ hard, and hard to get right on deploy 1, so
I’m sure they’ll iron out the kinks soon.

------
3pt14159
It's something so simple that they made complex. It's not just code
formatting, even things like italics are annoying to escape from if you're
used to the old interface.

Also, I totally understand their desire to get rid of the subdomain aspect of
slack. As a developer I get it, I really do, but now there is no way to easily
go in the browser to the slack that you want. It used to autocomplete now I
have to figure out which slack is what and I get confused.

~~~
snowe2010
wait what is happening to the subdomain?

~~~
3pt14159
Everything is switching to app.slack.com for now it redirects but it used to
be simple to know where you were and how to get to it.

~~~
snowe2010
how are workspaces gonna work then??? you just enter it every time?

------
sergiotapia
I just saw this pop up in our workspaces at Papa's slack at the end of the
day. Haven't had a chance to use it yet. Do you need to use the WYSIWYG or is
it still markdown friendly?

Edit: Should've read the article:

>That is, closing backticks are not respected! If you want the proper display,
you must hit right-arrow after the closing backtick (but before the space).
That’s quite a gymnastic for someone with decades of muscle memory.

This is trash.

------
jabagawee
This article reminds me of a recent post on HN titled "Text Editing Hates You
Too" [1]. WYSIWYG text editing is never easy, and I am sad to see another
instance of it taking over a spot where plain text (which still is not immune
to the issues in [1]) used to be.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384158)

------
lilyball
What Slack really should do is have a WYSIWYG editor that _keeps the markdown
syntax_. Just apply rich text formatting to the markdown syntax, but otherwise
leave the text alone. This will provide a nice reminder about what the syntax
does (I always forget that Slack treats asterisks differently than markdown)
but let me edit using all of the muscle memory that I've built over the years.

------
cben
FWIW, the editor they use, at least on the web, seems to be
[https://github.com/quilljs/quill](https://github.com/quilljs/quill).

I'm guessing Slack implemented something a-la
[https://github.com/patleeman/quill-markdown-
shortcuts](https://github.com/patleeman/quill-markdown-shortcuts), but not
very well...

In general the model of allowing separate positions for cursor inside vs
outside a span is a huge improvements over WYSIWYG assigning "sticky
formatting" to characters. (Hat tip to TeXmacs which was maybe first time I've
met that UI pattern.) But you have to do it consistently. E.g. end of literal
block has separate inside/outside but start doesn't.

(Of course, in source editing, it comes for free – formatting is delimited by
characters like * or ` and cursor is clearly before or after the delimeter.)

\----

I believe there is a saner middle ground — formatting as syntax highlighting.
You're still editing the source, no hidden state, just immediate in-place
feedback. (Nowdays some call this "WYSIWYM" though it's not exactly same)
Examples: [https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/),
[https://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html](https://codemirror.net/demo/variableheight.html),
[https://simplemde.com/](https://simplemde.com/),
[https://laobubu.net/HyperMD](https://laobubu.net/HyperMD) (the latter is
borderline, hides too many formatting chars IMHO, but does reveal them when
you move cursor to edit.)

------
AceyMan
I wrote this up twenty-two days ago. Ticket details: "the new text input is
whack." Support Request #2490163

And I pushed back later after the first round of "yeah, it's the new normal,
don't you like it," I wrote back with, "Yeah, no. This is a train wreck." And
went on from there.

Heading now to post the URL to this discussion as a supplement to my ticket
<hahaonlyserious>.

------
foolfoolz
we are all talking about this at work. this is the worst forced update!

------
greggman2
I'm guessing they are copying medium? Which also sucks for code. Sure, do
whatever is best for non-coders but please give coders a markdown option as
it's what we're using every place else.

I recently did my first post on medium. I wrote the post offline in markdown,
copied and pasted it in. Was first disappointed medium didn't support markdown
so I had to go reformat all of it. That sucked and had several of the same
issues mentioned in the linked article, like for example putting the cursor at
the start of a `inline-code-block` and typing puts what you're typing outside
the block. The only way to edit the start of the block is put the cursor
between `i` and `n` in `inline`, type your new text including a new `i` and
then delete starting `i`.

Another issue is it changed all '' and "" to ‘’ and “” which I didn't notice
and made all the code blocks not copy and pastable from the article.

------
noterminal
\------------My support request to slack------------

Alex Oct 31, 2:26 PM PDT

As a software developer I want to be able to use slack to communicate mono-
spaced text within messages that I write without having to touch the mouse.
The recent addition of dynamic text formatting in slack breaks the preexisting
markdown functionality because it is not possible for the rendering engine to
guess what my intent might be on the fly.

for example if I type this message:

The uuid portion is `D6B9E544-2306-41E7-9841-FF7E2AE0A5A4`_filename.txt

but then realize that I actually wanted a hyphen instead of an underscore
before the word 'filename' there is no way to accomplish this without deleting
and retyping "-filename.txt" (or doing a fancy trick where you add
"f-filename.txt" and then delete the leading f)

This is not a failing of your system which is quite well implemented, it is
simply a matter of WYSIWYG systems not being capable of rendering text with
the same precision as markdown systems.

I suggest that you make the WYSIWYG text formatting a toggleable feature for
people in the software development community.

\---------their very nice but not helpful response-------- Hey Alex,

Thanks for writing in, though I'm sorry to hear WYSIWYG formatting is not
working for you and your team as developers. It's not currently possible to
turn this off, but I can certainly understand your reasoning here, and will
share this feedback with the team so that we can best understand what the
right solution is.

Please note, I can't promise that we'll be making this optional anytime soon,
but will let the team know why it's not working in your case.

Sorry this isn't the answer you were looking for today Alex, but thanks again
for taking the time to share your feedback with us.

All the best,

Susie

------
olingern
It’s very annoying how it handles backticks via some sort of autocomplete.

Questions I ask myself about this: \- Why is this not an “opt-in” feature? I
could see it being useful for people not acquainted with markdown-like syntax

\- What PM / UX’er thought this was a great idea? I’m sure there was internal
feedback that this was less than ideal

------
sean0-
I just received this from Slack support and want to table flip.

> I'm afraid there isn't a way to revert to the old formatting method. We
> don't currently have plans to make the new formatting configurable though we
> are carefully considering all our customers' feedback.

I think I'd rather have Clippy shoved in my face.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Software Development organizations need to learn when to stop shipping
features. More isn't always better.

------
irreverentmike
This has been slowing me down immensely. I would have figured an easy
workaround would be to copy/paste any fancy markdown stuff I needed to use
from my text editor or IDE, but that only results in completely unformatted
text. At least slack is good with their /feedback command.

------
aftbit
Hmm I am actually not experiencing either of these bugs. The backtick
character works as I'd expect. I definitely prefer the pre-WYSIWYG interface
that is currently loaded in my Electron client though! Markdown is the perfect
level of abstraction for styling without getting in my way!

------
EGreg
We have to move the Web from a feudal society to a free market. To do that we
need a some platforms and micropayments systems that work across borders to
unify identity, social networking and commerce. Otherwise Facebook, Amazon et
al will do it!

Here are some ideas: [https://qbix.com/token](https://qbix.com/token)

Note: the token described there is optional to the system, but without a
native micropayment system we have to bolt on various payment solutions like
Patreon or live with ad-supported platforms. The original Xanadu vision was
hypermedia with micropayments.

I wanted to mention an interesting bit of engineering outside the pure
programming space. It is not enough to design the web-based payment system,
but we must take regulations into account as well. In order not to be
encumbered with securities laws, the token must be designed in such a way that
no one rational would purchase it for speculative purposes. In Switzerland,
there is a FINMA legal framework for classifying tokens as securities or not.
In the US, this is achieved by fitting within no-action letters of the SEC:

[https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-
noaction/2019/turnk...](https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-
noaction/2019/turnkey-jet-040219-2a1.htm)

In short, a lot goes into a system like this, and it has to be in place to
allow a free market by small entities able to compete with feudal lords. (Open
source is a free market with a huge gift economy, ie many things are produced
without a profit motive.)

Remember AOL, CompuServe, MSN? That was a Feudal society. You had to have AOL
keyword Facebook, Amazon etc. The Web browser and HTTP invented by Tim
Berners-Lee is what disrupted those centralized networks so you could simply
use DNS and build on your own domain. Now you could have Facebook.com,
Amazon.com and that is how they were even able to get their start. Do you
think AOL would have allowed “keyword GMail” as an alternative email?

------
xixixao
These bugs are typical of wysiwyg implementations. The only true, great,
wysiwyg (but not really) editor is Bear, which is actually mostly markdown,
but done in a way that lay person could use it without ever remembering any
markdown. It’s simply delightful (and works on the phone!!)

------
terom
While I've been happily using Slack's pseudo-markdown for a long time, a lot
of the less technical users on our slack have never posted messages with any
formatting, which makes things like copy-pasted error stacktraces a pain to
read.

Yay if we get more formatted messages on slack, and not just from technical
users that have learned markdown.

Nay if I have to struggle to get my messages to format the way I actually want
them to format. Having the new WYSIWYG editor show me the wrong formatting
while editing doesn't make the new experience any less painful.

Slack formatting UX is now different from GitHub. Having to deal with
Confluence/Jira formatting was already terrible enough - I now have to figure
out how to type the same things three different ways.

------
miguelmota
Agree it's terrible. Start a sentence with inline code and then try to go to
beginning of line to add words that are non-code. It'll think you're trying to
edit the inline code and you have to manually press the GUI buttons now to
turn off code mode.

------
snackematician
Does anyone know if this will affect the desktop client as well, or just the
browser interface?

Personally I prefer the browser interface because I find the Desktop
notifications and the Angry Red notification icon very distracting. But it
sucks to lose markdown.

------
ianstormtaylor
If anyone is interested, I think part of the issue with why inline code
formatting is so hard is related to these two Chromium bugs:

\-
[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)

If you star/comment on them to increase the understanding for Chrome's team
that they are incredibly frustrating that would be amazing!

------
saltcured
Oddly, I don't see those issues with Firefox.

If I type an inline `foo()` it converts to WYSIWG as soon as I type the
closing back-tic and everything I type after is back in normal text mode. If I
left-arrow to have the cursor inside the formatted div but before "f" and type
"bar." I wind up with the expected effect `bar.foo()`.

It takes one extra arrow press to move the cursor beyond the invisible back-
tic to shift from the inline code to plain text regions before or after the
block.

I preferred the old input just because I don't like having content jump around
while typing. I'd still rather hit the preview tab to see it rearrange itself.

~~~
StavrosK
I use Firefox and I've had nothing but trouble from the text box. It's just
atrocious, I don't know why they'd do this when the previous box worked so
well. At least make it an option!

------
drewg123
What I don't like about it is that it takes too much vertical space for the
row of icons at the bottom.

What I do like about it is that I'm forever pasting code snippets ``` code ..
``` and it saves me the time of entering the 3 backticks.

~~~
Androider
Press the "Aa" button and the row of icons goes away.

Based on the title, I was dreading checking this out but... I kind of like it;
Keyboard accelerators for dropping in and out of the various block and list
modes, quick action for code etc.

~~~
drewg123
Ah, nice. I hate how UIs these days require random clicking to discover..
Thanks for the tip!

------
bloak
Unusable input boxes are rather common nowadays. I know several web sites for
which I know from experience I should edit my text somewhere else and then
paste it in, then delete and repaste if I need to change anything.

In general, I've never met a WYSIWYG system that I've found satisfactory.
Admittedly, I do have a rather low anger threshold for stray invisible
formatting.

At an even higher level of generality, isn't it a bit sad that we still don't
have a good way of handling text on computers, something that lets you
portably handle typographic emphasis but doesn't allow stray double spaces and
crap like that?

------
thomasedwards
If you use Apple’s App Store you’ll notice that they have provided exactly
zero markup to help you make your changelogs. I think the only thing it
respects is line breaks. And I’m kind of okay with that after seeing this
mess.

------
tw1010
I really wish the tech community would stop encouraging "this and that is
_terrible_ "-style articles. It toxifies the whole atmosphere, and it doesn't
have to be like this if we don't want to.

------
whywhywhywhy
Still can’t believe Drafts can’t be turned off. It’s been a feature for months
now and I still find having the chat I’m working on fly to the top of the list
as confusing and distracting as it was on day one.

------
thom
Only now realising that something had changed. I've spent days thinking I did
something wrong that has made Slack more annoying. But of course more annoying
is basically the spec for every new feature.

------
sarink
I can understand how you might want this feature for all the non-techies that
use slack nowadays. But give me a damn checkbox to disable it at least??
Whoever made this decision deserves a real life slap

------
pgib
I feel like they grossly underestimated how many users regularly use back
ticks in their Slack messages – the rest of the formatting stuff seems to work
fine, but the back tick handling is just horrible.

------
piyushpr134
"Slack is terrible" \- There I fixed it.

It is not a troll comment. I tried to get my org to move to slack from
whatsapp groups. People (non tech) love them flexibility and UI etc. However
they were quickly disenchanted due to the various issues with the system like
it eats a few GBs on desktop, push notifications don't work on some phones,
some UI elements are very irritating (when you upload a picture, it vanishes
to a progress bar, trying to type anything with a / makes slack believe I am
typing a command etc etc).

We all went back to WA groups

------
cakoose
For me, if you type:

    
    
        when you do `foo()` it foos the bar.
    

It does the right thing for me. This was the case yesterday and it still is
today.

It's possible that the author got a different release. It's also possible that
the author was trying other very similar scenarios that behave differently,
e.g. backquotes behaves differently at word boundaries and inside a span that
has already been converted to the code-formatted rendering.

Overall it's pretty confusing, but the simple case that the original article
points out works fine.

------
twexler
I think this may have changed, very recently. Now when I paste any of the
example strings in the post, I get an alert that I've pasted markdown, with
options to apply formatting, or not ask again[1]. After that, it recommends
using a new shortcut, (Cmd/Ctrl)+Shift+F[2].

Not the best improvement, not the worst.

1\. [https://i.imgur.com/QXHWMpF.png](https://i.imgur.com/QXHWMpF.png)

2\. [https://i.imgur.com/Ksrjvf1.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ksrjvf1.png)

------
antoncohen
I've just had this change hit my desktop client, so it isn't web only. It is
very broken. Jira's new issue formatting is probably still worse, but I use
Jira less than Slack.

------
polote
Well I dont really understand why all of you are complaining, yes a product
manager tried to improve the way we can write things because 95% of people
don't know Markdown or something like that and the first iteration is not
perfect for code users.

But they will probably correct the pain points listed in this article, why
would they revert back their change if this is the best for Slack overall ?

Coming here is good to draw the attention on those issues so that they can fix
it, but this is not the end of the world !

------
mikl
Slack is quickly becoming the kind of enterprise software I hate having to
use.

If you’re on multiple Slacks, as is becoming increasingly common these days (I
have 23 Slack accounts, five of which I’m logged in to on a daily basis), the
UX is terrible. Whenever you switch from one Slack to another, you have to
wait for the whole UI to reload, often takes several seconds.

You’d think all that VC money would make them able to afford building a proper
desktop client instead of this Electron shovelware crap.

------
kelseydh
I still maintain that JIRA has the worst WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting
support, of any major code platform. It amazes me they are so dominant among
developers.

~~~
jlangenauer
Atlassian products aren’t popular with developers. They’re popular with
managers who don’t understand yet need to control developers.

------
tln
The article says typing this doesn't work-

    
    
       when you do `foo()` it foos the bar.
    

But it works fine for me.

His second big gripe is you can't position your cursor before a styled phrase
and add to the front of it. That's a legitimate annoyance, but tbf Google docs
and TextEdit behave the same way.

I'm 1000x more annoyed with the features taken away from ScreenHero than this
stuff. Or the channels jumping over to some "draft" list.

------
kjer
I understand they want to make text easier for non-tech folks, but they mess
with the feature only tech folks actually use

``` blocks are such a pain in the ass to edit now. Say you have ```aaa bbb```
and you decide you actually want... ```aaa``` ```bbb``` You get stuck in the
stupid codeblock editor, to actually leave it, you need to insert newlines and
extra ``` until it splits AND YOU END UP WITH MORE ```. Slack...please fix
this garbo

------
OJFord
I was mad reading this this morning, but now that I have (Electron app, macOS)
Slack open and try it - it's fine. I'd be fine without it, but I don't need to
tap arrow after closing a `` code block, and I can click or arrow back into it
and insert new code at the beginning/middle/end no problem.

I didn't need it, but it's not broken (any more?) as described and as I feared
reading earlier.

------
CSMastermind
Slack should understand their market advantage is targeting development
communities (with their partnership with Atlassian for instance).

Microsoft, Facebook, and others are going to eat their lunch as a generic
workplace chat tool.

And if your clients are developers than they're going to have different needs
and wants than your average non-tech user. They understand markdown, they
don't want the editor overriding their intent.

------
andrepd
It cannot possibly be worse than Blackboard's, so I guess slack has a few more
years before it hits "enterprise software"-tier quality.

------
hartator
I have also noticed that text goes behind the smiley or formatting icon this
past couple of days. On the last MacOS app. Which is mildly annoying.

------
mikorym
Personally, my shortened version would be "Slack is terrible."

Slack really is just such a frustrating tool to use (or rather _be forced to
use_ ).

------
tiborsaas
I'm maybe a superhuman, but it took me a few seconds to figure out how to
paste code as normal.

    
    
       backtick backtick backtick command-v
    

You can still use the create new > code or text snippet feature which I most
of the time I pick to share code.

It doesn't seem perfect but come on, it's isn't terrible either. I do see
however it as the perfect storm for HN crowd :)

~~~
nikisweeting
Yeah... it annoys me to no end. I cant fathom why they wouldn't support
triple-backtick syntax like literally every other modern chat/notes/forums
app.

------
sgt
What we needed was IRC with history. Nothing else. Slack keeps adding features
and making things complicated, even cutting ties to XMPP and IRC on top of
that.

On top of that it's running a terrible (yet seemingly good, so people are
fooled by its looks) Electron app, when all you wanted as a native app.

If I can find a good alternative to Slack tomorrow I'll move my entire
organization.

------
agluszak
First drafts
([https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/c8o2q8/can_i_disable...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/c8o2q8/can_i_disable_this_drafts_feature_yet/)),
now this. Why is that so hard to implement a switch? Why aren't we given a
choice?

------
franciscop
> I think the only way to insert text at the beginning of a code span in the
> WYSIWYG editor is to highlight the first character of the span and type over
> it

This seems better than what I was doing: put the cursor _after_ the first
character, type the new beginning, add the same character and remove the same
character from the beginning. Thanks for the tip!

------
bravoetch
I love reading the responses here about how these decisions are made. I've
watched a CEO at a unicorn constantly parade his vision past the UX and design
team until they all quit or were fired. He got what he wanted. Customers were
constantly battling the interface. And now he's worth sen digits so he must
have been right... Right?

------
kelseydh
I long for the day I can just write reformatted code in Markdown, GitHub style
-- with three backticks and a language declaration --- and Slack syntax
highlights the colours correctly within chats.

This is such an obvious improvement for developers who share code constantly
via Slack.

In fact, such an improvement, I would seriously switch chat apps to get it.

------
oromier
What the F? I use it as normal I mean I use the ``` symbols as I'm used to
without issues? Am I missing something ?

~~~
samfriedman
Seems like formatting characters are ignored in multi-line blocks (triple
backticks) but not inline blocks (single backticks). Most people are upset
about the latter.

~~~
oromier
There is the Aa button on the right which can disable the bar.. was that also
yesterday in place ?

------
yani
Exactly the same thing happened to WordPress in version 5 when they changed
the default editor. I am surprised that innovation is not embraced but it is
met with strong opposition most of the time. What amuses me is that no one
switched from X to Slack because of the editor but some will switch from Slack
because of it.

------
andrethegiant
Another instance of how making something "cute" (subjective) likely makes it
harder to use (objective).

------
romand123
I think Slack should use the GitHub model for dealing with markdown. Allow the
user the "preview" the changes. I can see Slack adding a new option to default
to preview mode or not. This way, those that just want to see the markdown
they've typed can default to no `preview mode`.

------
nemo44x
The product manager for this should be reassigned. To not even have the option
to opt-out and use the classic input box is ridiculous.

Productivity tools need to be very careful about radical change. Especially
when the change won’t make anyone more productive.

~~~
dang
Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It breaks the site
guidelines (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).
Note this one: _Be kind._

It's hard enough for people to hear criticism or fix mistakes without their
head, or a colleague's head, being called for.

~~~
sloum
The OP said they felt the person should be reassigned. This is hardly a call
for termination. It was also accompanied by constructive points about
productivity software relevant to the post at hand. I do not believe there was
anything unkind in suggesting that maybe the person was in over their head.

~~~
dang
I agree it's much better than saying explicitly they should be fired or (as
internet users often do) worse. Still, there's no need to get personal.
Organizational failures are almost never one person's doing, and having an
indignant thread sitting at #1 talking about how ugly your baby is is
punishment already.

The rest of the GP comment was fine.

------
jackjeff
Is there a way to continue "using slack" but actually rewrite your own client
with Markdown support... maybe something that is actually __NOT __using
Electron and gobbles up resources.

I had a quick glance at the API. It does look possible. What's the catch? Am I
missing something?

------
notjustanymike
I had no idea it was a feature. I just thought my Slack App was acting weird
and needed a reboot. Oh dear.

------
blemasle
That's why since yesterday on my French AZERTY typing a ` results in "`.
Thanks a lot slack! Another reason that proves and allows me to keep saying
that Slack is just a bad copy of IRC that's able to display useless gifs and
consumes 1 to 2GB of ram for nothing :]

------
GiorgioG
Slack is dead, they just don’t know it yet. Give Microsoft 2 years to keep
grinding on Teams, continue to drive corporate adoption and slowly kill off
Slack’s income.

I’m not a fan of Teams, but at work we’re switching Slack because we get it as
part of our licensing agreement (3,000ish users.)

------
MrOxiMoron
I just see we got the feature too, everything still works. can type the markup
like before and it just works, even the triple backtick to end the codeblock.
Also when pasting I get a popup asking me if I want to paste the literal text
or apply formatting.

------
njacobs5074
In addition to all the issues that others have raised here, I find that the
new widget chews up valuable screen real estate, especially in the "Threads"
view. They render the input widget for every single thread that you've
recently participated in.

Argh.

------
micimize
Always wondered why more markdown editors don't use the
[https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/) approach to WYSIWYG +
formatting symbols. Seems like the best of both worlds to me

------
DigitalSea
Slack in itself is terrible these days. For a company allegedly worth
billions, it is a terrible application and is starting to show its age. Even
the threads feature they added was horrible from a UX perspective and felt
like an afterthought.

------
kristopolous
Fixing problems nobody has by implementing features nobody asked for in ways
nobody wants.

------
efazati
The main issue is it is not consistent with Jira, Github, and other famous
services. I think these services should create a cross-editor and all other
services should use it. it is really socks to use a different editor in each
place

------
aschmid
I'm clearly in the minority here, but I like the new text input on their
desktop app. Visually seeing the text change when I create a code block or
bold text right away, rather than after I submit the message, is very helpful.

------
techbio
Agree with headline. Blew up with triple-backticks. &lt;code; displays
literally.

------
shmerl
So there is no way to off and switch back to markdown?

Extremely dumb way to roll out something without an option to disable it,
especially with the excuse "we are listening to your feedback". They literally
are not listening to it.

------
Nostromos
Devs aren’t the only Users nor are they most of slack users. Finally something
more useful for non-technical folks. Markup or other shouldn’t be a gatekeeper
for non-tech folks to get the most out of their software.

------
spion
WYSIWYG in general is terrible as it tries to hide the underlying structure
rather than show it. We really need an UX expert to rethink how these editors
should behave so we can move forward with editing rich text

------
teekert
I feel the same about the new Nextcloud MD editor, it's great, until you make
a formatting mistake or want to correct formatting. As a rule these auto-md-
renderers should come with a plain text editing mode.

------
carc1n0gen
I don't know. It's really not that bad. No one is forcing you to click on
these new buttons. The old markdown(ish) syntax still works, and even formats
live as you type it, which for me is awesome.

------
c12
I am so glad I am not the only person this enrages. I have all but stopped
using Slack for the time being simply because its too painful to use the
input.

Sure roll out a WYSIWYG editor but make it optional via a config flag.

------
sniku
Please... I just want to get my work done. Let me disable the WYSIWYG :rage:

------
tehabe
I guess, for non-tech people this is better, for tech people the markdown
input was better. That is why I don't understand why Slack doesn't give you
the option to switch between the two …

------
austinshea
It is driving me absolutely nuts.

The changes are so obviously ill considered, and, without having the data to
prove this, I believe it’s trying to solve a problem that very few people had
with the previous solution.

------
donmb
As the author states, you should just be able to toggle between WYSIWYG and
plain text and everyone is happy. This is the nature of all WYSIWYG editors so
why does slack not follow this approach?

------
dberg
I’ll remember this day when Zulip finally gets another wave of momentum.

------
devit
Seems like these guys need to learn the concept of consent, i.e. that if you
try to force someone to do something they don't want, they aren't going to
stick around with you.

------
iandanforth
Oooh I hope they try to support bulleted lists. There is nothing more painful
than trying to implement that correctly. Every time it works in Google docs I
am god damn _amazed_.

~~~
sethhochberg
They do, and it infuriatingly looks worse than

\- just

\- a

\- simple

\- list

If I needed anything more complex that that, Slack was already the wrong tool

------
cryptonector
Right now this has ~1,000 comments. That's... a lot for a post on HN on
something so mundane. That must mean that Slack users care a great deal about
this. Food for thought.

------
ch33zer
I don't think I've ever cared about something so little.

------
aivosha
It's fascinating to see how tools turn into environment people wanna live in.
Its a god damn tool, dont commit your lives to it. Use it, abuse it, it doesnt
work - toss it.

~~~
shultays
"Toss it" is not an option when it is a product your company uses.

Annoyances like this is not enough to make me toss it but it is still an
annoyance that could have been fixed by giving user an option

------
cwyers
I can't reproduce the example given in this blog post -- when I type out the
same thing in the new Slack input box, it renders correctly. Can others
reproduce the problem?

------
waynenilsen
Also discussed here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530246)

------
bouke
It seems to be equally bad to the WYSIWYG that Microsoft Teams provide, which
also has similarly MarkDown shortcuts. However the one from Teams isn’t even
deterministic.

------
tingletech
I can't reproduce the first issue;

    
    
      when you do `foo()` it foos the bar.
    

works as expected for me.

I do observe the second issue re trying to edit `foo()` to `bar.foo()`

------
jakub_g
A frequent flow that broke for me:

\- paste some code

\- go to the top and add ```

\- go to the bottom and add ```

Now to make this work you have to

\- add ```

\- only then paste the code

It's a "first world problem" but many small issues like this make stuff
annoying as hell

------
Kiro
I can disable it. Did they roll out a hotfix or something?

------
roomey
It seems like they are already fixing some of the issues that people are
describing. I can't reproduce this post's bugs at the moment

------
germs12
100% agree. I wrote to them and their reply was this: "We don't have any plans
to support turning the new WYSIWYG editor off."

------
estomagordo
Can someone please help me come up with a reason for Slack not making this
update opt out for those of us who can maneuver a keyboard?

~~~
viraptor
Maintenance overhead. It doesn't seem like it would be a huge change, but only
they will know the real cost of supporting both.

~~~
estomagordo
Yeah I don't know. I mean it's a textbox input field. How much maintenance can
there be?

------
alexnewman
They totally messed me up. Where are my snippets?

------
fr33k3y
Oh man!, this guy has just described how I feel about this!. I've been
thinking about trying other clients since yesterday...

------
thinkpad20
I just noticed that it was converting all of the &’s I typed into &amp;
escapes. Didn’t realize how much further it went.

------
monii
Hey guys, you can remove the additional line by clicking on the "Aa" option
(with 'Hide Formatting' title).

------
_bxg1
Hopefully someone who works at Slack uses Hacker News and sees this post's
500+ upvotes and 200 (mostly) angry comments

------
mikece
I’m willing to be that this change was motivated by investors. With Slack
going public there is going to be pressure to develop mass-market appeal and
not be focused on their earlier, more technical users. And maintaining
multiple versions — one for engineers, one with wysiwyg training wheels, and
more — becomes a headache in short order but might be the best approach to
making easier to use spins on the core product.

------
rerx
I just tried the new web client for the first time: Both issues highlighted in
the blog post seem to have been fixed already. As it stands it does not
actually feel all that disruptive to me.

It's a bit annoying that there is no way to toggle the WYSIWYG rendering, but
for me personally there have been countless times when I was missing some kind
of preview while editing. For instance to align stuff in preformatted
blocks...

------
petetnt
FYI: You can escape the tick by pressing right arrow: it's not optimal but at
least it works.

------
dijit
oh my god, thank you, I thought it was me going insane, I can't make code
snippets with syntax highlighting, when pressing the three graves (```) the
entire line (and only the line I'm on) becomes a monospace block, it totally
breaks how I use slack.

------
chasedehan
Total Garbage

------
stilley2
The example in the article reminds me of using Microsoft Word equation editor
back in the day.

------
btbuildem
Did any users ask for this change? Or was it some PM with not enough work
assigned to them?

------
azimuth11
I too do not care for the new text box.

Does anyone know why it only shows on one of my two Slack workspaces?

------
thomasfl
Slack seems to have added an "Aa" button that disables wysiwig. That was
quick.

------
hkt
Companies using slack should bill them for the lost time and productivity.
Money talks.

------
StopHammoTime
My Slack just refreshed and now the WYSIWIG is gone, it may have just been
rolled back.

------
mhw
Rats - did this remove the sed shortcut for editing (s/old/new) as well?

------
savoytruffle
People shouldn't use ` as a single quote because that's not what it is.

~~~
nikisweeting
It's for code, not normal quoted prose.

------
bobobooey
So one extra space after the back-tick is now considered a lot of muscle
memory?

------
edgan
I actually like the new backtick to codeblock style. It is three backticks
instead of six. I do agree the overall input box could be smaller.

My personal pet peeve is threads. The feature I didn't ask for, but can die in
a fire. Or they could make an option to have it auto flatten all threads.

~~~
client4
We do three backticks at keybase and it feels natural.

------
0xADADA
As of today i've switched my whole company back to AIM group chat

------
indigodaddy
I use the website for Slack, and it appears to have been rolled back.

~~~
indigodaddy
and.... it's back. Oh well, a few hours reprieve...

------
krzyk
Same as confluence, it is a pity that they force wysiwyg on everyone.

------
Vinnl
It seems pretty cool to me to work at a place where so many people use and
care about your work, but... It must suck to just open Hacker News, or even a
link someone sent to you, and be greeted with someone off-handedly dismissing
your work as terrible.

------
markfixers
Before it was the icon. Now the input box. What's next Slack?

------
xkcd-sucks
It's like overnight my text editor got replaced with MS Word

------
fithisux
I would rather have Slack accepting Latex or be a new Jupyter

------
yepthatsreality
This same issue exists for the Dropbox Paper WYSIWYG as well.

------
baxtr
I think we need all to calm down on this one. I was irritated in the beginning
as well, but I am sure I will get used to it. Change is always difficult but
part of progress.

------
ouid
Stop changing your products. All of you. Stop.

------
dangus
I get that it's bad right now, but it hasn't even rolled out fully. It's quite
clearly not 100% done or it would be 100% rolled out.

This seems like literally one bug.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
So if only 50% of the users have this, we should assume that it's only 50%
done, and that by the time everyone has this thing, it will be perfect?

More seriously, while "this doesn't work right" is part of the complaint, the
larger complaint is "this is fixing something that wasn't really broken." If
Slack wanted to _improve_ their editor, that'd be great, but they could have
done that without losing what people liked about the old system. It's not like
there's a lack of "quasi-WYSIWYG" Markdown editors out there to take cues
from.

------
reconstrukt
100% total clusterfuck. absolutely terrible.

------
nvr219
I'm ready to go back to irc

------
roschern
YES! This annoys me to no end!

------
jamiethepiper
The feature nobody asked for.

------
saagarjha
> there is no way to go back to plain old Markdown input

Can’t you just tap on the “Aa” icon to hide it?

~~~
jakub_g
This hides the row with the buttons, but the behavior of textinput remains the
same

~~~
saagarjha
Ah, I hadn’t tried to type code since the change so I wasn’t seeing the
difference.

The new behavior is maddening.

------
reconstrukt
absolutely 100% a total clusterfuck

------
liveoneggs
why is it multiple lines tall?!!!

------
riffraff
Yes, It is.

------
derision
Agreed

------
Setheck
how is this news, it seems like you should just report it to slack.

------
abbadadda
Get Mattermost instead of Slack! YC participant, free, and supports Markdown!

Note: No affiliation with Mattermost.

------
undefined3840
Their stock has been decimated. Tempted to still short it at this price. Very
clear it’s not much more than a feature that has quickly been commoditized.

------
nkkollaw
It really does suck!

------
nancycut9
certified ethical hacker :
[https://www.hackerslist.co/](https://www.hackerslist.co/)

------
pgcosta
What a bunch of whining babies. Are you really this upset with such a tiny
change? :D

I like the new editor. They shouldn't revert the changes. Like any change on
any software, people will complain first, some issues will be solved, and then
will adapt and stop complaining.

How can this have such an impact in your lives?

Stop slacking and work ;)

~~~
darkwater
I've just received the update this morning, I "complained" for a moment but to
be honest it's not that bad neither the end of any world. Plus, I can't really
reproduce (or maybe understand?) the Markdown problem he's reporting about
"when you do `foo()` it foos the bar". It work as previously did and as the
author expects on my computer.

