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Comment by niyazpk | Hacker News Reader

The first (and personally the only) requirement I have with any chat system is that it should _not_ modify the text I enter in any way - especially if I am pasting something.

Sometimes I have to paste a line or two of code, or a few lines of a stack trace. Sometimes I have to paste a string which contains some particular set of characters. Microsoft Lync absolutely destroys the pasted text. It subtly converts the double quotes into some unicode nonsense. Then it converts some common character sets into smilies. When you copy text from Lync it is almost always guaranteed to be different from what what entered originally. God, I hate Lync with a passion.

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It's like Slack's "smart" quotes feature that mangles your ascii quotes out of the box! So frustrating!

If you are on OSX, that is a feature of OSX, not Slack. You can turn it off in Keyboard settings IIRC.

My pet peeve about Slack as of late is -- is turned into a single, long-dash. Even when you're inside ` or ```.

Which leaves me juggling there on my keyboard, trying to delete one, move my cursor and add a second dash before submitting.

That's the OS, too.

On OS X just disable the dumb quotes and dashes:

System Preferences / Keyboard / Text / Use smart quotes and dashes = off

Thanks! I seriously now owe you ~3h of my life, yearly aggregated.

That's called an em-dash and it's done in the OS usually.

Source: I was a teen during the Desktop Publishing craze

Thank you! I really appreciate the clarity as I haven't seen this "Edit -> Substitutions" menu before. I have shared this learning with my friends.

If I were a developer of Slack, I would be very tempted to disable that OS functionality (similar to how Sublime Text does not seem to utilize this OS feature).

Ugh, please don't. The fact that Chrome ignores the fact that I have certain OS specific keyboard settings is infuriating.

Turn it off at the OS level if you don't want it. Don't make a decision that makes everyone else who uses the OS frustrated because functionality only exists in a subset of applications.

Agreed. I want more apps adhering to local conventions and generally being good citizens of the platform they run on, not less. It's so annoying when an application decides it knows better than my global system settings, especially when there's no way to change the behavior in question.

Also, this is in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences (where you probably want to make some system-wide changes to defaults so you don’t have to fiddle with the Edit menu in every application).

Thank you so much for this. I actually couldn't find it the first time through so I documented the whole flow with screenshots here: http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/osx/2017/02/16/getting-rid-of-smart...

I don't know Lync but googling found this...

http://superuser.com/questions/427542/how-can-i-paste-text-w...

Microsoft had a much better chat before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

If lync introduced its own font, what would it be? I had no idea this was the genesis of comic sans, but I'm so glad I do now.

Not sure how the heck I am just learning about Comic Chat and thus the creation of Comic Sans

Note that Comic Sans predates Comic Chat.

I'm with you with the Lync-hate. I've had problems with getting simple chat to work - in the middle of a chat session that seems to go well, Lync suddenly informs me some message wasn't delivered. And this happens often enough to be annoying. The web-integration (if you ping someone who is logged into Outlook web, the ping shows up in a popup window) is bad - if someone pings you within a gap of a few minutes, the original pop-up isn't re-used. There is a new pop-up, with no history. After using gmail chat, this feels regressive. And yes, there is the copy paste issue you mention. The screen-sharing is not robust - we've had so many sessions crash that we've moved to WebEx.

That the simple chat use-cases don't work well is, frankly, confounding to me.

Few years ago I've used few lines of code that I've copied from Skype. There was a hidden invisible chracter that was breaking everything, I've lost about 2 hours until I found it through a hex editor (I rewrote the pasted code and wasn't expecting for that character to be there). That character was not a part of the original message, but it was added by Skype.

I'm not sure about Lync but we got into the habit of pasting into a text file and attaching that when using Skype to send code / log snippets. Agreed that it is a major inconvenience at times.

Lync is by far the worst I have experienced.

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