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A comment on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible.

Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by jdoliner on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:23PM (#21590558)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by somebodythere on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:49PM (#21590707)
There's some delicious irony in those slashes getting swallowed by HN's markdown parser.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by mdaniel on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:43PM (#21600551)
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
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by jdoliner on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @09:42PM (#21590979)
Oh god I didn't even realize, one second I'll try to edit this.
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by LilBytes on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @09:28PM (#21590924)
I spent far too long looking at that and thinking why is the first or second slash drunk.
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by timcederman on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @10:50PM (#21591282)
If you hit ctrl/cmd-z after it automatically changes something you can keep going like you used to. e.g. try typing `foo`, and then hit ctrl-z, it'll revert it to plain text. I've found that useful for getting around the autoformatting.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by igetspam on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @11:18PM (#21591424)
That's ridiculous, right?. Cmd/Ctrl-z has a defined function. Slack is hijacking that because they've decided that decades of established patterns are wrong and creating another one-off for their very specific use case is the right thing to do. The hubris...
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by Doxin on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:16AM (#21592530)
It's not really that radical of a thing to do though. Word has the same sort of behaviour except utilising backspace. If you type " - " in word it creates a bulleted list, hit backspace once and you get the literal text you entered.

I'm not entirely sure which is the less-worse option here but at least it's not a wildly new concept, just a different button.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by gmueckl on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:11AM (#21593049)
There are other products out there that put automatic changes on the undo stack. I regularly encounter this behaviour in Visual Studio: pasting code in the editor is decomposed into pasting text and reformatting it. So the first Ctrl-Z reverts the code to the exact text you copied. The second Ctrl-Z will remove it.
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by ikornaselur on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:03AM (#21593019)
Interestingly, if I do that, it will then send it unformatted. I want to format in the actual chat, just not in my input.
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by mijoharas on Thursday November 21, 2019 @08:05AM (#21593614)
Interestingly, I suffered from the exact same asterisk problem last week, but it's now been fixed on my slack!

Good to see that they are shipping improvements to it now.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by pbreit on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @11:01PM (#21591341)
Your asterisk example works OK for me. As does the blog writer's "when you do `foo()` it foos the bar".
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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by rerx on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:41AM (#21592905)
I could not reproduce the example issues from the blog post, but the dual asterices inside the back ticks still fail for me.

The upside is that it's now possible to have bold passages in monospaced text. I missed that before.

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Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by indosauros on Thursday November 21, 2019 @08:48AM (#21593906)
Here's a gif of the second issue from the blog post, just reproduced on my client

https://i.imgur.com/X8FZJhi.gif

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by rerx on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:16AM (#21594860)
Ah, earlier today the Slack app on my Mac had not updated yet -- there I experience the same issue.

The web client on Firefox works better, though: https://imgur.com/a/X53iIlm

Edit: On Chrome it's broken for me too....

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by pbreit on Friday November 22, 2019 @07:26PM (#21611522)
Well, that just looks like a bug then.

I think the concern is mostly about what Slack was actually trying to achieve.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible by narrowtux on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:45AM (#21592661)
Yeah, seems this was fixed pretty quickly by not parsing the ` immediately but only after you've entered the closing `
[ Parent | on HN ]