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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

Recently had to start using MS Teams at work. What a terrible UX: truncated message widths, even for code. No syntax highlighting, markdown-ish syntax only works when you type it in their little editor—when you paste it in it doesn't format, isn't smart enough to auto-start a new message when I start typing, hides bottom of message—even when there's only one line left, etc. Just a bunch of little stupid things that add up to one, in the immortal words of Strong Bad, suckquake of a user experience.

In short, I would have loved to have the option of using Element to chat with my team instead of MS Teams. Thank you for making this!

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There's also the lag. Basically every action in the interface needs to redraw everything... slowly.

There's a noticeable reaction time between clicking on a person's image in the left bar and the screen being updated. Even when going back and forth between two contacts, even with 64 GB of RAM, so you'd think they'd cache it somehow.

Sometimes when scrolling up in the chat, it goes back down then continues scrolling up (even when the contact is offline, so nothing changes the history).

Even the buttons on the left side (activity / chat / teams / etc) lag when the mouse just passes on top of them.

Also for some reason there are regular CPU spikes (on the order of 20% of an 8th gen desktop i5) even when I'm not actively using it.

I find it so stupid that this same computer can run fairly new games at 4K resolution with all settings at the max and nearly 60 FPS, but it somehow struggles to update a chat application.

If you think the lag in teams is bad try using slack, especially on a lower-end laptop! Used to be relatively snappy 4-5 years ago and I swear it gets slower with every update now.

I hate search in Teams. It is the worst I've seen in a chat app.

The search result will only show you the single message it matched but not all the other messages around it! The only option is literally scrolling up but the performance just degrades as you go further back.

Like I can tolerate a lot but damn. That always frustrates me to no end.

Search in teams is completely useless. Slow, no easy way to filter/organize results, and scrolling is the only way you can go through results with extremely slow load times. It's a joke.

I find that the upside of having switched from Slack to Teams is that Teams is so astonishingly terrible that I find myself not getting stuck all day in it like I used to in Slack. With Teams I get in and get out. My colleagues do the same so I get ~10 Teams messages a day, while my wife in Slack gets hundreds. It’s the perfect example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

The markdown formatting doesn't even work consistently. Some days things show up bold, some days they don't, some days I get inline code, some days I don't. It's very random and seems to be based on my typing speed at the time. That is, type ` and then wait a moment before typing the next bit and it works more reliably, but if I type like normal (around 100 wpm) it rarely registers properly.

Yes! What is with that inline code thing? The only time single backticks seem to work is when I don't want them to.

Microsoft Teams

Cons: slow, consumes lot of memory plus all of the above

Pros: not as buggy as Skype for Business

that's exactly my thought, despite all the suckiness, the experience is still better than skype for business

The customer group for teams seems to be used to the likes of Cisco Webex, Skype for Business, Lync and similar crap. Compared to those, Teams is a step up.

My $employer is still on skype for business. I usually liken the choice between SkypeFB and teams between having a broken leg (Skype) or a stubbed toe (teams).

Of course given this binary choice I would prefer a stubbed toe, but can we just move to something that is actually pleasant? Thanks!

Given this bridge moving to element seems like a no-brainer for anyone on teams.

And the backstick only works if you start by the left one.

The markdown formatting renders differently in the desktop client depending on whether you are in the main application window or a popped-out chat window...

Which are both different than the formatting that the browser version of Teams shows.

I'm now in the habit of typing the opening backtick, ctrl+shift+v to paste some line of code, then having to WAIT a second or 2 and then type the second backtick. That usually formats it correctly. But I'm also very quick on the backspace and retyping the closing backtick, which is sometimes necessary.

Starting a new chat with someone in your organisation that you haven't chatted to is also annoyingly slow. This one I keep forgetting. So I search their name in the search bar, choose the hit from the dropdown and immediately start typing, only to notice that my initials 10 keystrokes didn't register, because the new chat was still initialising.

I'm curious, do you touch type? I'm also at about 100wpm, but only thanks to learning to touch type.

If you want to get partially read of the Teams UX / UI, check my project. I'm working on providing a Teams library and a Teams CLI:

https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli

Yeah, it's astonishing how bad Teams is.

On code blocks, you can have syntax highlighting. However, inserting them is a pain and you have to manually select the language.

Ich course, everything still sucks, yes.

And to add to the list: there is no way to reply to a message, although they have this implemented in the mobile client for ages.

This. Seems they will never fix it.

Sometimes messages are displayed out of order, or not at all untill you restart the app. Scrolling up unloads the bottom messages so you can copy. It's impossible to quickly go back to look at a conversation last week, the API throttles you from seeing your own discussion. Opening the camera from the android app frequently crashes

I cannot for the love of life even figure out how to make a simple group chat with a couple of people without creating a calendar entry, even less with external users.

There is syntax highlighting, just takes a few clicks as it's hidden in a sub-menu ("code snippet").

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