Timeline for Opt-in alpha test for a new Stacks editor
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
38 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 22, 2022 at 9:42 | history | edited | Yaakov EllisStaffMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 | completed, preview mode now available |
| Mar 30, 2021 at 17:28 | comment | added | 0Valt | I was one of those who opted in for the new editor when it became an option on MSO. Sadly, I had to turn it off after a while exactly for this reason. I am a web developer, and for any web dev nowadays having the ability to preview your work live is a thing of vital importance. Yet SE decided to take a step backwards. If it is decided, please, give us an option to have the preview to the bottom or to the side. | |
| Feb 8, 2021 at 19:06 | comment | added | lineage | no preview would be a disaster, togglable preview versatile though the best would be a distraction-free side-by-side preview....something that I had asked for here meta.stackexchange.com/q/340425/669146 | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 10:41 | comment | added | Travis J | This should be one of those cake and eat it too situations. The implementation of the rich text editor actually condenses the content back into markdown behind the scenes anyway... soo, we should keep both. There should be the same markdown editor everyone adores... and there should be a rich text editable preview pane. This is accomplishable because, as noted, the rich text implementation is already doing the heavy lifting, so any changes made in the editable pane, can easily be pushed to the markdown pane; the inverse (markdown -> preview) is already a solved problem (ty atwood/balpha) | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 23:49 | comment | added | Martijn Pieters | This is absolutely a deal-breaker for me. I rely so much on being able see the produced output that I regularly resize the current editor text box to maximise the preview area so I can have full control over what the final rendering of my hand-crafted Markdown looks like. I just can’t get that same immediate feedback and control from the new editor. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 22:37 | history | edited | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | CC BY-SA 4.0 | added 259 characters in body |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 18:08 | comment | added | KRyan | @Catija All right, that is not the impression I had gotten—side-by-side is one thing, but your apparent dismissiveness and negativity began before that was ever suggested. My suggestion, then, is that a “show/hide preview” toggle under the Markdown editor, similar to what we currently have for editing posts, be provided (and remember its state). That would result in no loss of functionality for those who prefer what we have (and we would reap other significant benefits, such as the in-line formatting in our Markdown, which I love, just not enough to give up the preview willingly). | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 18:02 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @KRyan that's absolutely not my intention. I'm 100% in agreement that not having the preview is a huge change that I'm struggling to adapt to myself. I literally do not preview my posts on Teams because I can not take the risk of the RT mucking with my MD. But I need to understand your arguments so that we can find a solution that actually works and I'm trying to explain exactly why things like side-by-side are out of scope and non-options. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:59 | comment | added | KRyan | @Catija The tone of your every comment on this request has been very much “Who needs this? No one needs this. This is dumb and pointless and we shouldn’t waste our time.” So while I agree entirely with your position that we all use the platform differently, and have different needs, and there is an importance to finding a solution for everyone, you are the one who has been dismissing the needs of people with different use cases and advocating against there being any solution for us. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:38 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @KRyan I've written hundreds of short posts across the network. I'm 100% willing to accept that my usage is atypical but I think it's fairer to say that everyone uses the platform differently and have different experiences. For example, some may only look at the rendering while drafting and others never look at it except when actually previewing. The reality is that everyone is different and all experiences are valid. We need to understand them all so we can find a solution that works for people. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:11 | comment | added | KRyan | @Catija I think you might consider, perhaps, if your usage of the site might not be strongly atypical—you wrote this Question with the old editor, and you have written a large number of unusually-large posts as part of your role, but that isn’t how most users generally interact with the site at all. You might consider how that is skewing your perspective here. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:11 | comment | added | Tinkeringbell Mod | One thing that isn't mentioned in this post: I use the current, live preview a lot when writing posts. When writing regular sized posts on a regular sized screen, I keep my eyes on the live preview instead of the editor >90% of the time, probably only taking them off if I have to add an image (as just pasting those in doesn't work and requires a click to confirm). Toggling to get this preview is nowhere near as fluent or useful, and the argument that you can 'edit right in the preview' makes no sense to me as you can't actually write MD in the RT editor. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:10 | comment | added | KRyan | @Toastrackenigma No, the ideal one is probably size-by-side maintaining both scroll and caret position, but that has already been nixed since SE is adamant about their poor design decisions revolving around widths despite fairly massive community opposition. Which just puts this feature request as another example of the core functionality of the site being sacrificed on the altar of pushing new products. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:05 | comment | added | Shog9 | I'm with @Robotnik here: sizing concerns would be irrelevant if the content area was fully-responsive (both large and small), but because there are constraints the editor can provide a misleading view of what will be visible / what will be cut off. Stuff like max height for code blocks makes that even more of an issue. Not everyone cares about presentation, but the system should accommodate those who do! | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 17:03 | comment | added | toastrackengima | @KRyan Oh, I hadn't considered MathJax at all actually, this would be horrible in that use case. Probably horrible for the syntax they use on the chess site too, and I'm sure there's a couple of others. The other issue is that it turns out you don't keep your caret position when you toggle, so at the very least that needs to be fixed too. I did always think the scrolling was a horrible design too though, and having a way to jump to the insertion point would be nice; but I definelty don't think this soultion is the ideal one. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 16:54 | comment | added | KRyan | @Toastrackenigma No, it’s not ideal for long posts. Often posts are not that long. Posts are usually quite short, and are usually supposed to be quite short, and furthermore—and I suspect that this is a key point that is being misunderstood, though I am not the first to mention it—MathJax-heavy posts often require a lot more checking of the rendered output and can take up far less rendered space than the code takes up writing space. But MathJax seems to be getting ignored entirely in this process, so far as I can tell. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 16:12 | comment | added | toastrackengima | @KRyan On my system at least I get scrolled up to the text box whenever I type something on the old editor, so your approach doesn't really work consistantly at the moment anyway. For long posts I actually think it's better with the toggle because the scroll position is maintained and you don't have to try and find your insertion point in the preview -- just need a keyboard shortcut for it. For small posts hopefully the WYSIWYG editor is good enough that you won't need to switch back to markdown for trivial edits, and with the planned markdown shortcuts for inline formatting it should be. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 14:43 | comment | added | KRyan | @Catija A useful feature but not a replacement for the fundamental ability to see the result as I am typing. I routinely type—with Markdown syntax—while watching the preview rather than the actual text field. I do not want WYSIWYG, I like controlling my Markdown and moreover it simply isn’t how I work, I write * not Ctrl+I and retraining my fingers is approximately 0% within my interests. I don’t write documents in word processors, I write code. What is shown here is akin to what is found in Github—which I find miserable near to the point of unusability. This is a massive regression. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 14:07 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @Basj As noted in the question, we weren't able to get all of the shortcuts hooked up for the alpha but it's definitely on our list of things to add, in particular, to toggle modes. We had a discussion last week, actually, about what the shortcut should be but didn't reach a consensus. I'd be curious to know if y'all have thoughts. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 8:39 | comment | added | Basj | @Catija Is there a keyboard shortcut to switch between Markdown and non-Markdown preview? Without any shortcut, it's barely usable for now. I think this is asbolutely needed, even during an alpha test. Good luck to the team! And congrats SE for always innovating :) | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 5:42 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @Robotnik That's a huge screen. We've fixed the max page width and it's utterly out of scope to change it just to make the editor have a side-by side format - we'd have to redo the entire site for that and that's nowhere in any plan for the future. Making the entire page that wide would be a hardship for readability for many people. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 5:23 | comment | added | Robotnik | @Catija - the image I provided was from a 1920x1080 screen (image resolution is 1920x1048 because I cropped the taskbar) - is 1080p considered a 'huge screen'? Plus, the content section being too skinny was something specifically called out by the community when the responsive design changes were announced. I don't see why Left/Right sides can't be moved out to give the Q&A more space. Another post by Monica (pre-incident) asks why the right-hand column is even needed - there's enough space in the left column to fit most of the RHS stuff. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 3:19 | comment | added | Michał Lipok | What you mean huge screen ? I work on 24'' and this is for me standard. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 2:53 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @Robotnik generally, that only helps people on huge screens. Even with the standard width page, a two-column option is really skinny. And on mobile, requires a completely different view. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 2:44 | comment | added | Robotnik | @Catija For a lot of posts - the default edit box size gives plenty of preview. Also - what about placing the render alongside, rather than under, the edit box? | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:51 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | Like I said, I completely understand the trouble of scrolling. But please provide the ability to view both Markdown and rendered output at the same time in any way, even if it's not in the current form. The current editor provides for that in a majority of cases; I don't want it to go down to 0% of cases. Implementing it for 100% of cases is also a valid (and better) way to implement this feature request. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:46 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | The majority of my edits are of the former varieties, editing posts or sections of posts whose live previews of what I type and raw Markdown are visible at the same time without scrolling. I don't want to be shut out of that case all the time, simply because of a minority of edits which require scrolling to see one or the other. Also, see my post's paragraph about using subtle Markdown and HTML nuances. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:41 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | @Catija In the case of posts that aren't longer than one screen, I actually can see what I type in both raw Markdown and a rendered preview: the page is scrolled so that the bottom 2-3 lines of the editor box are visible, so they're both visible at the same time. The same also applies when I'm editing the top sections of posts that are longer than one screen. When editing the bottom sections of longer posts, however, you're right, I can't see both at the same time, but that's only some of the time, not all of it. (continuing) | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:35 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | You don't have this now. You can't see what you type as you type it without scrolling. Can you please explain how the toggle doesn't address your needs? | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:31 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | @Catija The complaint here isn't about the absence of a preview below the post - it's about its absence overall. I'd like to see a rendered preview live, without having to switch back and forth, while typing Markdown. As I say in the last paragraph above the line, said preview need not be below. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 1:28 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | I mean... I created this post in the old editor and the frustration of scrolling up and down to see specific edits... takes its toll. With the editor, I could have flipped back and forth and the spot I was at would've been pretty close with no scrolling at all. I love the preview, too... but it's not the best solution by a long stretch. I think there's definitely a benefit to the toggle though I wish the cursor position was retained. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 0:50 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | @LShaver The problem is not about having to use the mouse to click on the switch - it's about having to flip back and forth at all. | |
| Jan 27, 2021 at 0:49 | comment | added | LShaver | What about a hotkey to switch back and forth? | |
| Jan 26, 2021 at 23:17 | comment | added | KRyan | Being unable to see the rendered output while typing Markdown would be utterly unacceptable. Absolutely must be fixed. | |
| Jan 26, 2021 at 22:44 | comment | added | user1937198 | Having an option to have it side by side could be useful on wider desktop screens. | |
| Jan 26, 2021 at 22:35 | comment | added | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | @Robotnik Yeah, I raised this in the Charcoal team feedback thread as well (the team I'm a member of), and incidentally it was the highest-voted suggestion there. | |
| Jan 26, 2021 at 22:32 | comment | added | Robotnik | +1 this was something I raised in the Mod Team's 'Rich Text Editor feedback' post too, and is probably going to be the one of the biggest issues for long-time power users of the sites. | |
| Jan 26, 2021 at 20:36 | history | answered | Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog | CC BY-SA 4.0 |