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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

Please just let me send code blocks in chat without messing up the line breaks...

How do people deal with Teams' vastly inferior chat after coming from Slack or Mattermost or anything else remotely modern?

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I begged and pleaded with my Microsoft rep about this and he went between myself and the Teams people; the current behavior is intentional and a design decision.

they want (they REALLY want) to allow users to copy from Teams and paste into Teams as RTF and many of their design decisions revolve around this decision. when you type markdown formatting cues into Teams they get converted to RTF which is why it's such a pain (or simply impossible) to edit something at either end of a specially formatted bit of text.

maybe they've undone this stupidity in teams 2.0 but their love of backwards compatibility tells me "no," very loudly.

Wtf rtf? If they want to preserve that then create an rtf box mode and separate it out for most users which expect something else.

why support two input mechanisms when you can only support one?

NIH syndrome raging in Microsoft culture still, I see.

it's more about clipboard interop between Office applications, even old ones, and old documents created with those tools.

> maybe they've undone this stupidity in teams 2.0 but their love of backwards compatibility tells me "no," very loudly.

All I can say is hold your praise.. :(

I recently switched to a company that uses Teams, after the last two companies I worked for using Slack.

I ran into this one constantly. And lately when I paste something in and set the paragraph type to monospace, it puts a box around every single line! I've tried using the code snippet thing, but that adds so much padding and insists on adding a title. I've kind of given up on trying to make code or terminal snippets look okay in Teams.

It's frustrating that a company with as many developers as MS has can't seem to get this right. Do they not dogfood Teams? Whatever happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers!"?

Have you managed to figure out how to create a numbered list with more than one item in it? I certainly haven't.

Type `1. <text>`, then just press Enter to add new items. Press Enter twice to finish the list.

Also, tab and shift+tab seem to work to indent and unindent, for sub-lists.

Wait, what? The effect of the Enter key changes from sending the message to adding a newline when within a list? There's no indication that hitting enter won't just send the message like normal. Thanks for the heads up!

> How do people deal with Teams' vastly inferior chat after coming from Slack or Mattermost or anything else remotely modern?

I'm an engineering manager at a multinational company, which also have remote employees.

Half a year ago, we got a new Director of Engineering, who decided to move from Slack to Teams, due to compliance implementation.

No one in the engineering teams want to use Teams at all; they deal with it by secretly having a Slack Team that only they (as far as they know, at least) know about.

While the rest of the company is forced to use Teams, the engineers are using Slack as they've always been doing.

OneNote users have been asking for full-featured code blocks for decades at this point and MS can’t or won’t do it.

Not surprising to see it suck so bad in Teams.

Coworkers copy/pasting code snippets through teams led to data corruption in production. That was a fun one to track down.

> Please just let me send code blocks in chat without messing up the line breaks...

Teams supports inline and multi-line code blocks using Markdown formatting. I can't try it ATM, but does that not work as it does in Slack?

In a 1:1 chat, there's no support for multi-line code blocks. There _is_ support in team channels, but when you copy-paste on the receiving end, line breaks don't make it through into the paste buffer.

It’s buggy as hell and non-intuitive

Teams does not use proper markdown formatting. In both Teams and Slack you can open a code block with three apostrophes (```), but in Slack you can also use three apostrophes to close it. In Teams that doesn't work - the only way to close a block is to type in two consecutive line breaks. This means you cannot have empty lines in the middle of your code (at least not without workarounds).

Shift+Enter is your friend, at least in that one particular situation. Alt+Enter seems to work as well. Ctrl+Enter will send the message.

Teams code blocks using triple tick screw up indenting. To get a semi functional code block I have to click 3+ buttons in the text formatting screens. It’s a train wreck.

The same way I deal with any Electron app with exception of VS Code, run it in the browser and only during the time I am obligied to it due to project requirements, it it is delivered, I quickly forget my account.

Pastebins.

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