Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by danpalmer 2005 days ago
People value what they are used to. I write code in an editor every day, and I use my editor somewhat deeply, using plenty of shortcuts to manipulate text quickly. When editing text in Notion it feels unproductive because I'm used to a code editor.

Someone with a different background may have no problem with the text editing, because they're not used to anything substantially different, but may have an issue with another part.

It's great if we can take a step back and see the bigger picture, if there's more productivity overall, but perhaps the things you care about happen to line up with Notion well, where the author's didn't.

1 comments

Totally fair, but I wouldn’t expect Notion to work exactly like a code editor. What I do like is they stick to the universal language of “working apps”.

So slash commands, markdown support, code snippets, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, rich embeds, etc.

Those are the bare minimum for me, but I don’t think any of their competitors actually have all of these features which is one of the reasons Notion is a good fit for me (and most people that try it).

You're right about not being a code editor, but I guess by that I mean that I expect regular text navigation to work flawlessly. Things like alt+arrow keys/holding shift for selections, cmd+up/down for start and end, and the rest. These combinations are often composable for selection, so cmd+shift+up should select to the beginning of the document. These work in my text editor, text fields in every app, Notes, TextEdit, etc, but they often fail in subtle ways in Notion.