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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

No disrespect to those who feel different, but personally I don't like Notion because I feel uncomfortable editing documents live without a separate step where I can review changes, where a stray keypress might do damage to the document that I don't notice. Google Docs tends to affect me the same way.

Also, I think a lot of stuff that winds up in Notion, in the contexts where I have used it, would do better living in the relevant repository so that changes to docs can be better tied to changes in the code.

Also also, every time I use it I wind up with The Hues Corporation's Rock The Boat in my head, and while I like the song it shouldn't be on loop in my head more than once or twice a quarter please.

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Google Docs if you have editing privileges you can switch to suggesting mode and it will allow you to “suggest” changes (diff like) instead of outright make them, I usually like doing this for documents which aren’t mine.

Notion I agree but it does have a way to lock a page so you can explicitly unlock it to make edits, more clunky than having a “suggesting mode” but it works.

And both product actually have history so if you do accidentally blow away something or add garbage you can revert to the version before you made accidental changes.

Similarly, I prefer writing markdown in my editor of choice, then copy-pasting it into whatever documentation thingy my employer used, (at that time, Esa [0]). Notion treated the entire piece of markdown as a single 'block' or whatever their terminology was, meaning I had to reformat the whole thing again. That was really annoying and is the sole reason I stopped using Notion.

[0]: https://esa.io

I used notion for a long time. I was never satisfied with it, but everyone around me used it, and so did I.

2 months ago I found a good alternative called ERA. It is targeting developers and their needs (as far as they market it that way).

It's currently free to use as it is in beta, but for me it offers everything I need.

https://era.sh

Do you think a manual "save" button would solve this? I ask because am in the midst of creating a SaaS with no autosave. Was worried this would be a turn off. But some users prefer manual save! Would love your opinion. Note: there is a "crash-protect" feature, in case of crashes before saving.

Not sure if this would apply to your app, but a common pattern is to display a "draft saved" type autosave message. (Email, for example.)

A manual "save" button would help, with autosave reduced to (as you say) "crash-protect" (although depending on context that could include up to a full undo-redo tree); I'd especially like an ability to see all the changes that I'm proposing, to add some notes about why I'm making the changes, and to handle conflicts semi-manually. If you're thinking this sounds a lot like git, yes.

I'm happy to have my opinions considered, but I would caution against overfitting to them - most people don't seem to like the UX that I like.

Invent drafts. Auto save drafts.

To me, it's just barely short of a moral principle that software should never accidentally lose user content. "Crash-protect" is only adequate with a very broad idea of a "crash". On mobile or in a browser tab, the app might get killed at any time to save memory. Am I going to go to Wikipedia on my phone to get some info for what I'm writing in your app, and come back to find a blank text box again? Or if I get distracted in the middle of it and then have to reboot my computer fit an update? These might look like orderly shutdowns, not "crashes".

On our site we implemented a step where you have to re-publish your post. For that exact same reason.

Can't you just revert or undo just about anything in notion, Google docs, etc?

Yes, if I notice I did it.

Yeah they have version histories built in.

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