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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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