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by gmjosack 1858 days ago
I've recently started using Notion and I'm surprised at few things that I find incredibly annoying with it so far. Since it seems there are some Notion staff here I'll take this as a change to give some feedback to hopefully improve the product.

* No read-only mode. I like to have documents default to a read-only mode so I don't accidentally typo random characters, or delete something when try copying. etc.

* No floating table of contents. There is a ToC block but it's at a fixed position, where it's not terribly usable especially for long documents having a giant ToC at the top isn't great. I've tried using columns but it just squishes the rest of the document way too much

* Floating heads. When you have multiple collaborators the avatars zooming up and down the left side of the document is incredibly distracting. I'd love a way to disable this completely. I don't care where in a document other people are reading.

* Database/Table horizontal scrollbar. Almost every database in our documents end up with this giant scrollbar that spans edge to edge, looking like a horizontal rule, breaking up the visual flow of the page significantly. I keep thinking it's some kind of page break.

These are just some of my initial impressions. I do think it's a very visually nice product and has a lot of neat features but I'm pretty surprised by some basic QoL stuff missing and hope to see it further refined.

3 comments

While we’re making a wish list, the biggest thing for me would be permissions on database tables. It’s very hard to centralise info using tables when you need multiple versions for multiple people (e.g. if I’m tracking job applicants in Notion, I want to be able to store some personal information but not necessarily show that to everyone).
Would you like to set permissions per column? Read-write-modify?
Exactly that, yes!
> No floating table of contents.

I built a browser extension which does this plus many more customizations like full width for all pages, scroll to top button etc.

Notion Boost: https://gourav.io/notion-boost

Item #4 on your list drives me nuts as well.

I can't remember which, but either making the page full width or locking the page gets rid of them.

I just added custom CSS to make the scrollbar only show on hover