Amusingly, it used to be great! When I first started using JIRA, it was just markdown. Then they introduced their WYSIWYG editor, but at least they still had the button to see the raw markdown and you could still edit the raw markdown (but the GUI made terrible markdown so if you wanted to use markdown you better start with that and never touch the GUI).

And then I guess at some point they just removed the markdown part?

It boggles the mind. Who made that call? What were their reasons?

markdown is too hard for product people

This is my biggest gripe.

I make an effort to write detailed comments about what I did, what I discovered etc. This is really helpful to reproduce the issues, and a few months down the line it helps to clarify exactly what happened.

JIRA text editor is FUCKED. Try adding bullet points after a code insertion. Does not work. I have to first create all the bullets, then step through them and write out whats on my mind. For more complex stuff, I just write in my code editor. How can you fuck up the most basic functionality?!

My gripe for the text editor—if you navigate away from the page, by an accidental click or keypress, all your text is lost. This kind of thing was solved 15 years ago; it's table stakes!

My favourite gripe about text editing in Jira is that the ticket body and ticket comments require subtly different formatting mark-up, and the wysiwyg widgets for formatting are also ever-so-slightly different.

This results in a fun game of me trying out single backticks, triple backticks, braces, double braces, other miscellaneous punctuation symbols, and various indents before giving up and trying the formatting toolbar, only to waste another couple of minutes clicking around to see what works.

Somehow I can never remember what worked either, so I find myself repeating this ridiculous dance on at least a weekly basis.

Although IIRC, there was a recent update that at least harmonised the code formatting syntax between editors, although I can't remember if it actually worked....

> This results in a fun game of me trying out single backticks, triple backticks, braces, double braces, other miscellaneous punctuation symbols, and various indents before giving up and trying the formatting toolbar, only to waste another couple of minutes clicking around to see what works.

I thought I was the only one who is annoyed with this. Not only that, but the editor when you first create the ticket and the one used to later edit it are different too. I can't think of any sane technical reason that might explain using more than one rich text editor.

So frustrating! Not sure if it's just in team-managed projects, but they look to have fixed this, e.g Description field maintains a draft across page-loads, until you hit save now :)

Definitely this 100% I proposed for company game night: Predict where the Jira cursor goes next in response to right arrow. There’s so many possibilities: right left up down, teleports, disappears. My favorite is when the cursor splits into two at two different seemingly unrelated locations. Two cursors?? How do you even do that in a text area?

The worst thing is that I nod along in agreement with all 9 points, and still find myself easily preferring a pragmatic well set up Jira (yes a unicorn) to juggling things around 25 trello boards or a siloed top down micromanaging corporate hellscape overconfigured Jira.

But the last time I enjoyed using Confluence was in the 1.x days with non wysiwyg wiki markup. Confluence been truly awful for a while now - eg why can't I ever find what I'm searching for?

At the very least, use the same markup language for both Confluence and Jira.

Jira/Confluence Cloud use the same markup and editor.

But neither supports a markup language AFAIK. They used to support Markdown but they dropped that long ago and never replaced it. Now the only choice is their garbage WYSIWYG editor.

Jira isn't great but the Confluence editor causes me more frustration than anything. And good luck getting anything in or out of Confluence with their document model.

Confluence is definitely their worst product. It's like they took the idea of a Wiki, but removed all it's good aspects and then combined it with a terrible CMS system. A competitor could just use an ancient WikiWikiWeb installation and be better.