[epivosism]

Surprised no one is talking about how awesome slack is. Think about it in user stories:

* I want to find someone by name => ctrl+K

* I want to search with sane keywords => search, "from:me" "to:<channel name>" work.

* I want to remember someone I talked to recently => people you chat with show up in the list on the left

* I want to keep com channels organized as the ground changes => easily rename channels, favorites UI works well, channel grouping works right.

* I want to give a public emotional response to someone's statement => reactions

* I want to continue discussion of a point someone made, which may not be relevant to everyone in the channel => threads

* I want to edit a typo I just made => hit up on keyboard

It's got that quality Factorio has, where you can let yourself imagine it is the ideal product, and start expecting features you need to be there, rather than not bothering to explore because you think they won't be.

It is AMAZINGLY good at solving actual user stories around communication. I have lots of respect for their PMs.

[anderspitman]

Sorry, but dropping Markdown support in favor of an input UX that is to this day atrocious gives me little faith in Slack's user stories moving forward. I'm fine if they want to make the default mode more intuitive for a broader audience, but I have yet to hear a good argument for not having a little button to enable raw Markdown mode.

EDIT: See comments below for instructions on re-enabling Markdown mode.

[niij]

Preferences --> Advanced --> Format messages with markup.

̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶r̶k̶d̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶s̶t̶y̶l̶e̶ ̶U̶R̶L̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶:̶ ̶ ̶[̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶e̶!̶]̶(̶h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶/̶/̶e̶x̶a̶m̶p̶l̶e̶.̶c̶o̶m̶)̶ Never mind, it looks like Slack has fixed this!

[ihuman]

They originally got rid of markdown completely when they added the WYSIWYG editor, then added that preference after people complained

[niij]

Yep, I remember that. It was quite the controversy at the time.

[goerz]

I think it does, but only when "Format messages with markup" is on, see https://slack.com/help/articles/202288908-Format-your-messag... and the asterisk at the bottom

[anderspitman]

THANK YOU

Honestly surprised I haven't come across this before.

Also, link formatting seems to be working for me?

[niij]

This was broken when I tried it out during the Markdown-->WYSIWYG switchover a while back. I updated my OP to show they have actually fixed this (go Slack!). I just switched back to Markdown again.

[jakswa]

I still have my pitchfork from all the bugs I encountered when they released the new formatting (still works wonky depending on the workspace for me). That said, I believe this is an option since they changed things:

  I have yet to hear a good argument for not having a little button to enable raw Markdown mode.

That toggle is buried in the preferences/settings under "advanced."

  Format messages with markup
  The text formatting toolbar won’t show in the composer.

[Arubis]

Settings -> Advanced -> Format Messages with Markup may be the first thing worth doing for you when Slack comes back online.

[eurasiantiger]

They have one. Kinda.

[zestyping]

Significant regressions in Slack:

* I used to be able to type a message containing "@channel" or "@here" and just hit Enter without looking, and 100% of the time it would be parsed correctly. Now it fails to detect the "@channel" or "@here" often enough that I have to look to see if it failed, then go back and retype that part of the message until it lights up. Once a week or so, I see a message posted by someone else that contains "@channel" in black, and they expected the message to notify everyone but it didn't.

* Recently Slack pushed everyone to switch from usernames to full names with spaces, and eliminated the entire concept of unique usernames. There were many annoying consequences to this, one of which is that when I type "@name", now I have to look to see if it highlighted, or look to interact with the drop-down menu, instead of just typing and knowing it will work.

* Searching also got worse for the same reason. When I type "@name" in the search bar, it NEVER lights up. For 90% of searches this means I can no longer type in a search query and just press Enter. I always have to look through the drop-down menu and either mouse-click or press down-arrow repeatedly to get to the thing I want.

[Mandatum]

> * Recently Slack pushed everyone to switch from usernames to full names with spaces, and eliminated the entire concept of unique usernames.

That's your Slack settings my dude, blame your admins.

[jordache]

It sucks in that you can't edit the image attached to a message. Only text..

WTH? Why not?

[ISL]

Agreed. Major pain point for me. Can't reshuffle image order, either.

[jordache]

it's like they just don't care.

Why can't you have image inline with text? I hate to waste energy to refer to attached images in my text ("regarding the 2nd image")

[iandanforth]

ctrl+k should be 'create link on highlighted text', I'm constantly frustrated by this.

[caleb_thompson]

Ah but ctrl-v while highlighting text with a URL on the clipboard creating a link is such a nice experience. I honestly wish I could do that everywhere.

[brandonmenc]

ctrl+k should be "kill line" and I'm constantly frustrated by the "create link" behavior in apps like Confluence.

[ectopod]

What? ctrl+k should enter a digraph.

[johnward]

I love slack. Slack search is terrible for me, but maybe it's the quality of data it has to search through.

[schnevets]

I'm curious about how many users are on your organization's Slack. I consider it one of my go-to sources for my org that has had between 250-300 people for the past 3 years. I can see it being suboptimal for a bigger company, though.

[thamer]

I'm in an organization with many thousands of people and find search to work very well.

Does the pricing plan influence the amount of resources your organization can use? e.g. slow search on the free plan, but much better on Enterprise Grid.