Slack's new WYSIWYG input box is terrible - <AUTHOR> https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2019/11/20/slack-rich-text-box/ <comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> 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.

<comment><USER6> So in other words: you still need to be "tech savvy" to do this...

<comment><USER7> 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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 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.

<comment><USER8> 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)

<comment><USER9> 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.

<comment> 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;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER11> > 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER15> A lot of that stuff still works self-hosted, which is a hard requirement in some places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 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.

<comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER18> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> There's some delicious irony in those slashes getting swallowed by HN's markdown parser.

<comment><USER7> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER22> 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."

<comment><USER23> >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).

<comment><USER24> >MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync)

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

<comment><USER25> Not sure why you were being voted down - Teams was explicitly positioned as a competitor for Slack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 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?

<comment><USER27> 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"...

<comment><USER28> 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!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER29> 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,

<comment><USER31> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER33> what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor for a large website

<comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER34> 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)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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 :)

<comment><USER36> 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.

<comment><USER37> 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)

<comment><USER38> > solutions things are more complex

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

<comment><USER39> > 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.

<comment><USER40> > 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.

<comment><USER39> 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)

<comment><USER40> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> > 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)

<comment><USER43> 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.

<comment><USER44> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

<comment><USER46> 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)

<comment><USER47> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> 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...

<comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> 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.

<comment><USER51> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 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?

<comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER54> 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.

<comment><USER52> Hold on, if you have a dict like structure with the channels as keys then no, implementing that is not so easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 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.

<comment><USER56> 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.

<comment><USER57> 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".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER58> Back in ye olde days, we'd call this WYGIWYS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> 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)

<comment><USER60> > 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.

<comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER62> > 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.

<comment><USER63> 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...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> 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.

<comment><USER65> 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.

<comment><USER66> 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 :)

<comment><USER65> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> 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!

<comment><USER68> 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.

<comment><USER69> 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).

<comment><USER70> You literally just italicized "need", and I read it the way you intended it.

That's why tech people italicize stuff.

<comment><USER69> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> 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.

<comment><USER72> 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.

<comment><USER73> 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.

<comment><USER72> Yes, and most of us would do the same thing running a product, if it means more profits. Optimizing for Shareholder value...

<comment><USER47> What happened to self-respect and the desire to provide a quality profit that makes people's life better?

<comment><USER72> 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.

<comment><USER47> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> 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.

<comment><USER75> 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.

<comment><USER76> 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".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> 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.

</comment><comment><USER78> 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.

<comment><USER79> 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.

<comment><USER78> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> 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.

<comment><USER81> 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_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> 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.

<comment><USER83> 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)

<comment><USER84> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> 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.

<comment><USER86> 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?

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> 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.

<comment><USER88> I'm just curious about the ssl proxy + api modification part in general - <USER2> a ref for that for a more mundane application?

<comment><USER87> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> 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.

<comment><USER90> Ugh, I can't stand the menu reordering for drafts!

<comment><USER89> All they needed was a highlight or an asterisk or something similar.

<comment><USER91> It wasn't always this way. There used to be a pencil icon next to the person/channel you had a draft in.

<comment><USER89> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> 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.

<comment><USER93> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> 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.

</comment><comment><USER95> 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.

</comment><comment><USER96> Someone has supplied a fix: [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg- bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet)

<comment><USER97> Wow thank you so much, both to you and the author. Can confirm it works as advertised!

Please upvote parent to the top!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> 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.)

<comment><USER99> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> 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?

<comment><USER101> it works for me too. I'm confused...

<comment><USER100> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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.

<comment><USER103> How is voice chat on Slack working in Ripcord? I'm guessing not at all?

<comment><USER104> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> 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.

<comment><USER106> Why wouldn't they make this optional? Then everybody gets we they want.

<comment><USER107> Exactly. How hard can that be. It's almost like they're on a mission to piss off their technical users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> 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.

<comment><USER108> Also, I don't know what anyone expected from a company that looked at HipChat and thought, yeah, let's buy _that_.

<comment><USER109> Probably just a bartering chip for better jira integration

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> 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.

<comment><USER111> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> 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!

</comment><comment><USER113> 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.

<comment><USER114> This sounds like you've never had a good one.

A _good_ product manager can make a world of difference.

<comment><USER86> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> 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.

</comment><comment><USER116> 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...

</comment><comment><USER57> 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).

</comment><comment><USER117> 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.

</comment><comment><USER118> 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.)

</comment><comment><USER119> 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.

</comment><comment><USER120> 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.

</comment><comment><USER121> 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.

<comment><USER122> Please don't post about this here

<comment><USER121> Huh? Why not? It seems completely relevant.

<comment><USER122> It's also relevant to those who would take it away. Widespread adoption will compel them to break it.

<comment><USER121> They're obviously aware of it. The #1 contributor to the project, both by commits and by LoC, works at Slack.

<comment><USER122> And as long as too many people aren't using it over the core product, they'll allow it to exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> 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

</comment><comment><USER124> 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)

<comment> 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...

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> Someone made a bookmarklet to disable it: [https://github.com/kfahy/slack- disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg- bookmarklet)

</comment><comment><USER126> 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.

</comment><comment><USER127> Your user experience has been "enhanced".

Share and Enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER128> YES IT IS. I literally am not able to enter some things, like a `>` quote followed by a line that is NOT a quote.

<comment><USER129> There is a workaround for this which works quite well. Press the down arrow 1-2 times, and you escape the quoted context.

<comment><USER130> The problem here is that generally the arrow keys are in awkward positions unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> 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.

</comment><comment><USER132> "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.

</comment><comment><USER133> 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)

</comment><comment><USER134> 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)

</comment><comment><USER135> 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.

</comment><comment><USER136> 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".

</comment><comment><USER137> 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.

</comment><comment><USER138> This bookmarklet disables it on web [https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable- wysiwyg-bookmarklet](https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg- bookmarklet)

</comment><comment> 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)

<comment><USER139> Awesome, but looks like this relies on disabling A/B testing, so it will die once they fully roll it out :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER140> 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?

<comment><USER141> 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.

<comment><USER78> 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.

<comment><USER141> This works great for developers, but your project managers and executives will not enjoy this experience as much.

<comment><USER78> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> 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.

</comment><comment><USER143> 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/)

</comment><comment><USER144> 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.

</comment><comment><USER145> 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

</comment><comment><USER146> 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.

</comment><comment><USER147> 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.

</comment><comment><USER148> 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.

<comment><USER149> wait what is happening to the subdomain?

<comment><USER148> 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.

<comment><USER149> how are workspaces gonna work then??? you just enter it every time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> 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.

</comment><comment><USER151> 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)

</comment><comment><USER152> 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.

</comment><comment><USER153> 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.)

</comment><comment><USER9> 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>.

</comment><comment><USER154> we are all talking about this at work. this is the worst forced update!

</comment><comment><USER42> 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.

</comment><comment><USER155> \</comment><comment></comment><comment>My support request to slack</comment><comment></comment><comment>

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.

\</comment><comment>---their very nice but not helpful response</comment><comment>-- 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

</comment><comment><USER156> 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

</comment><comment> 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.

</comment><comment><USER157> Software Development organizations need to learn when to stop shipping features. More isn't always better.

</comment><comment><USER158> 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.

</comment><comment><USER159> 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!

</comment><comment><USER160> 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?

</comment><comment><USER161> 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!!)

</comment><comment><USER162> 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.

</comment><comment><USER163> 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.

</comment><comment><USER164> 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.

</comment><comment><USER165> 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!

</comment><comment><USER166> 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.

<comment><USER45> 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!

</comment></comment><comment><USER167> 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.

<comment><USER168> 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.

<comment><USER167> Ah, nice. I hate how UIs these days require random clicking to discover.. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER169> 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?

</comment><comment><USER170> 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.

</comment><comment><USER171> 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.

</comment><comment><USER172> 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.

</comment><comment><USER173> 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.

</comment><comment><USER174> 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

</comment><comment><USER175> 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.

</comment><comment><USER176> "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

</comment><comment><USER177> 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.

</comment><comment><USER178> 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)

</comment><comment><USER179> 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.

</comment><comment><USER180> 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 !

</comment><comment><USER181> 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.

</comment><comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER182> Atlassian products aren't popular with developers. They're popular with managers who don't understand yet need to control developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> 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.

</comment><comment><USER183> 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

</comment><comment><USER184> 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.

</comment><comment><USER185> 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.

</comment><comment><USER186> It cannot possibly be worse than Blackboard's, so I guess slack has a few more years before it hits "enterprise software"-tier quality.

</comment><comment><USER187> 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.

</comment><comment><USER188> 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_ ).

</comment><comment><USER189> 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 :)

<comment><USER190> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER191> 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.

</comment><comment><USER192> 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?

</comment><comment><USER193> > 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!

</comment><comment><USER194> 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?

</comment><comment><USER12> 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.

</comment><comment><USER195> 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 ?

<comment><USER196> 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.

<comment><USER195> There is the Aa button on the right which can disable the bar.. was that also yesterday in place ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER197> 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.

</comment><comment><USER198> Another instance of how making something "cute" (subjective) likely makes it harder to use (objective).

</comment><comment><USER199> 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`.

</comment><comment><USER200> 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.

<comment><USER201> 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.

<comment><USER202> 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.

<comment><USER201> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER203> 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?

</comment><comment><USER204> I had no idea it was a feature. I just thought my Slack App was acting weird and needed a reboot. Oh dear.

</comment><comment><USER205> 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 :]

</comment><comment><USER206> 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.)

</comment><comment><USER207> 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.

</comment><comment><USER208> 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.

</comment><comment><USER209> 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

</comment><comment><USER210> 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.

</comment><comment><USER211> Fixing problems nobody has by implementing features nobody asked for in ways nobody wants.

</comment><comment><USER212> 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

</comment><comment><USER213> 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.

</comment><comment><USER214> Agree with headline. Blew up with triple-backticks. <code; displays literally.

</comment><comment><USER215> 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.

</comment><comment><USER216> 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.

</comment><comment><USER217> 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

</comment><comment><USER218> 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.

</comment><comment><USER219> 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.

</comment><comment><USER220> 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.

</comment><comment><USER221> Please... I just want to get my work done. Let me disable the WYSIWYG :rage:

</comment><comment><USER222> 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 …

</comment><comment><USER223> 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.

</comment><comment><USER224> 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?

</comment><comment><USER225> I'll remember this day when Zulip finally gets another wave of momentum.

</comment><comment><USER226> 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.

</comment><comment><USER227> 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_.

<comment><USER228> 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

</comment></comment><comment><USER229> 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.

</comment><comment><USER230> I don't think I've ever cared about something so little.

</comment><comment><USER231> 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.

<comment><USER232> "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

</comment></comment><comment><USER233> 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?

</comment><comment><USER138> Also discussed here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530246)

</comment><comment><USER234> 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.

</comment><comment><USER235> 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()`

</comment><comment><USER236> 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

</comment><comment><USER237> I can disable it. Did they roll out a hotfix or something?

</comment><comment><USER238> 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

</comment><comment><USER239> 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."

</comment><comment><USER240> 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?

<comment><USER241> Maintenance overhead. It doesn't seem like it would be a huge change, but only they will know the real cost of supporting both.

<comment><USER240> Yeah I don't know. I mean it's a textbox input field. How much maintenance can there be?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER242> They totally messed me up. Where are my snippets?

</comment><comment><USER243> Oh man!, this guy has just described how I feel about this!. I've been thinking about trying other clients since yesterday...

</comment><comment><USER244> I just noticed that it was converting all of the &'s I typed into & escapes. Didn't realize how much further it went.

</comment><comment><USER245> Hey guys, you can remove the additional line by clicking on the "Aa" option (with 'Hide Formatting' title).

</comment><comment><USER246> Hopefully someone who works at Slack uses Hacker News and sees this post's 500+ upvotes and 200 (mostly) angry comments

</comment><comment><USER247> 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.

</comment><comment><USER248> 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...

</comment><comment><USER249> FYI: You can escape the tick by pressing right arrow: it's not optimal but at least it works.

</comment><comment><USER250> 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.

</comment><comment><USER251> Total Garbage

</comment><comment><USER252> The example in the article reminds me of using Microsoft Word equation editor back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER253> Did any users ask for this change? Or was it some PM with not enough work assigned to them?

</comment><comment><USER254> I too do not care for the new text box.

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

</comment><comment><USER255> Slack seems to have added an "Aa" button that disables wysiwig. That was quick.

</comment><comment><USER256> Companies using slack should bill them for the lost time and productivity. Money talks.

</comment><comment><USER257> My Slack just refreshed and now the WYSIWIG is gone, it may have just been rolled back.

</comment><comment><USER258> Rats - did this remove the sed shortcut for editing (s/old/new) as well?

</comment><comment><USER259> People shouldn't use ` as a single quote because that's not what it is.

<comment><USER190> It's for code, not normal quoted prose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER260> So one extra space after the back-tick is now considered a lot of muscle memory?

</comment><comment><USER261> 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.

<comment><USER262> We do three backticks at keybase and it feels natural.

</comment></comment><comment><USER263> As of today i've switched my whole company back to AIM group chat

</comment><comment><USER264> I use the website for Slack, and it appears to have been rolled back.

<comment><USER264> and.... it's back. Oh well, a few hours reprieve...

</comment></comment><comment><USER265> Same as confluence, it is a pity that they force wysiwyg on everyone.

</comment><comment><USER266> 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.

</comment><comment><USER267> Before it was the icon. Now the input box. What's next Slack?

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

</comment><comment><USER268> I would rather have Slack accepting Latex or be a new Jupyter

</comment><comment><USER269> This same issue exists for the Dropbox Paper WYSIWYG as well.

</comment><comment><USER270> 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.

</comment><comment><USER271> Stop changing your products. All of you. Stop.

</comment><comment><USER272> 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.

<comment><USER273> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER274> 100% total clusterfuck. absolutely terrible.

</comment><comment><USER275> I'm ready to go back to irc

</comment><comment><USER276> YES! This annoys me to no end!

</comment><comment><USER277> The feature nobody asked for.

</comment><comment><USER278> > there is no way to go back to plain old Markdown input

Can't you just tap on the "Aa" icon to hide it?

<comment><USER236> This hides the row with the buttons, but the behavior of textinput remains the same

<comment><USER278> Ah, I hadn't tried to type code since the change so I wasn't seeing the difference.

The new behavior is maddening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER274> absolutely 100% a total clusterfuck

</comment><comment><USER279> why is it multiple lines tall?!!!

</comment><comment><USER280> Yes, It is.

</comment><comment><USER281> Agreed

</comment><comment><USER282> how is this news, it seems like you should just report it to slack.

</comment><comment><USER283> Get Mattermost instead of Slack! YC participant, free, and supports Markdown!

Note: No affiliation with Mattermost.

</comment><comment><USER284> 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.

</comment><comment><USER285> It really does suck!

</comment><comment><USER286> certified ethical hacker : [https://www.hackerslist.co/](https://www.hackerslist.co/)

</comment><comment><USER287> 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 ;)

<comment><USER288> 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.</comment></comment>