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>Google Docs has some of the most cursed UI that I've used in the past 20 years (and I work with Jira). I'm forced to use it at work so I stick with it.

>FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

I guess that's a philosophical point. I have pretty much zero interest in markdown. And, as someone who has used word processors since the 1980s, I really like Google Docs (and Google Slides) they pretty much do all of the things I want and rarely lack a feature I need. (Might feel different as a lawyer for revision tracking and my use of Sheets is far lighterweight than my use of Lotus and then Excel was back in the day.)

And I think I'd just give up were I to go make to emailing copies of documents around.

It's not perfect for everything and everyone but the Google Suite works really well for me.

There's an easy solution here: Offer both! Google can afford to offer two kinds of document editors, and it would make the entire GSuite infinitely more valuable and enjoyable to me.

I already have a bunch of Markdown text files synced to my GDrive – why can I literally not edit them in the GDrive web interface? There's not even a basic text editor!

Which can be the formula for adding another layer of features that 1% (or whatever) of users care about.

Want me to really bake your noodle?

Ready?

It has Markdown mode as an option.

Peak HN, perfectly executed:

- "it's obvious my pet peeve feature X should be added to Y, the company in the article".

- "I don't like X".

- "Can we have both?"

I'm guffawing

Peak HN is also claiming Y already supports X without showing any evidence.

And no, converting a `#` into a H1 is not "markdown support". I want a non-WYSIWYG mode that can let me work on plain text and export it without changing a single comma or tab, optionally with a WYSIWYG presentation layer on top of that like Dropbox Paper does, but one that does not let me add non-markdown features (which would inevitably get lost when exporting and re-importing the same file, or parts of it via copy and paste).

Update: You made me look: Sadly still no Markdown support. I would have been very happy to be wrong here.

I’m with you. I would love this so much.

Maybe irrelevant, but I will say that my spouse who spends a lot more time in Google docs can’t be bothered to learn even the markdown shortcuts for H tags in docs even though it would save her a ton of time. I imagine that’s a large majority of people.

You redefined Markdown support into "only Markdown support." No refunds, sorry. :)*

Absolutely no trillion-dollar company is going to ship a product at scale that's simultaneously obsessed with: Markdown only, non-formatted Markdown, and Markdown.

That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.

* also, note both my and my parent post are proceeding with the premise that perhaps both are desirable, I'm not sure why you felt deceived that Docs didn't become a Markdown-only editor

Markdown shortcuts just really aren't markdown, no refund needed, in the same way that supporting j/k keybindings for <- / -> isn't the same thing as Vim. It's about 10-20% of the way there.

And Google Docs has already shipped "pageless doucments", arguably a huge break with the paper-skeuomorphic word processor model (that makes it so much more usable on mobile, among other advantages).

I really don't think a "light" mode that tones down the WYSIWYG-ness further is out of reach for a company of Google's caliber.

> That's a niche feature available in many code editors, I suggest Visual Studio Code.

That's completely unworkable for fast-paced collaboration, though, and additionally doesn't give me documents synced across devices.

GDocs' conflict resolution capabilities are phenomenal (both between multiple contributors and multiple offline devices); I'd just love to be able to use these with Markdown.

Markdown in Google docs: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en

Of course, if you want non wysiwyg, then don't use Google docs just use markdown in a text editor or install mediawiki or something.

Yeah, I want non-WYSIWYG, or at least something that cleanly copy-pastes into and out of markdown.

I don’t get to choose, and I bet a considerable fraction of Google Docs users don’t either and it’s just what their workplace prescribes.

>> Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt.

> How would the existence of LLMs make "classic" web search worse? SEO spam and content farms cluttering the first results page has been going on for longer too.

To add my latest peeve, google search is suddenly terrible at units. When I look for "24 inches in cm" it gives me an answer in meters. And duh, I know that conversion, but until quite recently my browser search bar was a handy little calculator and now that's gone.

Surely we aren't blaming GPT for this.

It still works for me. What if you try it in an incognito window?

Ah, fun. It didn't work on my last few attempts, it works today. Gotta love the internet.

> FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG, and I don't understand what's so hard about that for somebody of Google's caliber.

This exactly hard on Google's caliber.

Not only do they have a bunch of requests for special modes where they can't simply add all without creating a mess, but at that size they also have to consider the support cost of users hitting the "wrong" mode and being tied to it and being frustrated.

WYSWIG is core to the product definition.

I do see that it’s not a simple problem. But this brings us back on topic nicely: This is Google we’re talking about!

There was a time when the name was synonymous for the best software engineering and some of the brightest minds in the world! And here we are arguing whether two different editing paradigms in one word processor might be too hard for them.

> FWIW, 90% of my gripes would go away if it just supported a "markdown mode" instead of WYSIWYG

Approximately nobody wants this though. Sure, you want it, and I want it, and some other people like us, but we're a rounding error of the user base of Google Docs.

This would be a great plugin, but very difficult to justify building as a first class feature.

And there's nothing wrong with protobuf :)

I just saw a markdown mode show up today, but only partially, like bold and italics in markdown

If you think jira is bad you should try deltek costpoint. Holy shit.

Don't say its name!

its name

Costpoint is the UI hell you didn’t even know existed until you see it for yourself.

It’s timesheet software that appears to be a legacy Windows app using an unholy number of compatibility shims to run in the browser. Almost nothing is a native control!

It sometimes refuses to load randomly, and can be really slow at certain hours. Its job is to record a few numbers for each user once a day.

It can be used for a lot more than just timesheets, and the UI gets weirder and weirder in those other features.

Microsoft's "Azure DevOps" is worse than Jira.

TBH I'm surprised we aren't forced to use it since it's a Microsoft product and whenever there's a Microsoft version of something we seem to get forced to use it. Weird.

The only thing worse than B2B for UX is B2G.