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Comment by ibluehh | Hacker News Reader

Notion

Same thing. Incredibly slow and clunky for me as well. Seems like all tools go through this evolution because you know, somehow they have to get VC-sized returns instead of staying small and nimble.

I stopped using tools with any kind of lock-in or custom format because I know they will eventually degrade into something unusable.

I find it telling that notion managed to break the core web concept of the hyperlink by implementing their own version of the <a> tag.

If I middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab, I paste-insert my clipboard content _into the link text_ instead (I'm on Linux). That's just horrible.

(I work at Notion)

It's actually the browser's default behavior to do what you're describing! Inside a `contenteditable` element, links no longer behave as links -- they aren't clickable, and hovering over the link doesn't show a preview of the HREF attribute in the browsers I've tested. So in order for links to do link things, we have to fight the browser and re-implement these behaviors.

Here's a codesandbox with no JS to demonstate this: https://codesandbox.io/embed/optimistic-resonance-jbyeef?fon...

I created a task to track this bug internally. I think we can probably solve by calling preventDefault for the middle-click event if it bubbles up from inside a link.

Oh hey, I didn't see your reply until just now, thanks for the explanation and trying to resolve it! I understand the technical issue now.

I still don't understand the UX. Am I assuming correctly that it's core to the concept of Notion to always be editable and not have an edit/view flip switch? Because I never used Notion to write anything, I just read things other people wrote. And so it's arguably weird to interact with a webpage that as it turns out is secretly an editor only masquerading as a webpage. Sly!

(not gp) Is there any way to track the progress of this? I would be very happy to see this fixed.

Btw, if links inside a contenteditable aren't supposed to behave as links, why make it clickable in the first place? Because if you make it act like a link, you indeed have to reimplement the whole thing because of expectations.

I'm no interaction designer, but imho a simple edit button would be mucher simpler. It could still be integrated nicely, no need to have wiki-like editing where the entire context is lost.

I think an edit button could improve Notion’s UX for small touchscreen devices where drag gesture is used for both scrolling and editing, but it would make the product worse for larger screen devices with precise pointing. It’s better to work hard in order to build the ideal product, than to make developers lives easy at the cost of a worse product.

It's nice but it's slow. Would love to have a solution that combined Notion's capabilities with Sublime Text's speed and maybe JetBrains's ability to work with keyboard shortcuts.

You might take a look at Obsidian. For me it’s the best of two (or how many you like) worlds. You can sync your files via git or a cloud service of your liking. What bugs me is that it’s not open source but what makes it great is a lot of open source developers contributing plugins and themes.

I know it's biased because it's an opinion from a competitor, but it's interesting nevertheless:

https://blog.standardnotes.com/33536/how-not-to-build-a-secu...

Have you considered adding a capability for plugins to draw HTML into an <iframe sandbox>? I'm always pondering such features, but I'm wary of letting a plugin potentially block the CPU forever with custom <script> elements. I have a solution to plugin CPU blocking for pure API plugins (https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten) but not a way to meld it safely with HTML access.

I‘ll give it a read, thank you!

Oh, I did. It looked real nice but I'm not there yet. Sticking to Sublime Text for the time being but if I were to switch to something right now, I'd be Obsidian.

Notion has a very nice feature set. I like to use it for my freelance side business.

Currently it is sadly the best set of features within one tool for me (at least the subset I use). I would love to switch to an open source variant to self host. But till then I will probably stay with it.

Still. I don't like the slowness (web and app). I don't like how it feels just off sometimes. And how the Android app just so-so works for me.

What bugs me more than Notion not being open source is that the notes are nowhere on my device apparently but on their servers. I don’t have anything locally. If something happens to Notion or I don’t have access to the web, I’m done?

Notion has export function that allows exporting your entire workspace to Markdown, HTML, or PDF. I do it once a month so that. (It'd be really nice though if Notion had an automated solution to back up to Google Drive, etc.)

Today I’ve learned! I knew about the export function but not that you could export the entire workspace. I’ll take a look into that. I’m currently 50/50 between Notion and Obsidian, however a blog post regarding obsidian plugins makes me think twice…

I use notion and I have to say regardless of what you want to use it for it will probably do much more than that for your use case once you understand how it works.

My only quibble is the lack of offline functionality.

Yes. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, it's nice being able to use them and not be subject to connection issues or server outages, or developer whim.

Notion is just way too convoluted.

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