Upcoming changes to the way you write in Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hello,

I’m a product manager with Confluence Cloud and I wanted to let the Community know about some upcoming changes to the way you write in Confluence.

#1 — A new design that matches the new Confluence look.

We recently rolled out a new design for Confluence, with a focus on creating a more intuitive and simplified experience. We're now extending the new design to the editor – for pages, blog posts, and comments.

Notice that we’ve simplified the toolbar by moving a few items from the toolbar into the insert (+) menu. For images, most of you are using copy/paste or drag n' drop, and for links, we see often see pasting a URL or using keyboard shortcuts. The Undo/Redo buttons are also gone, just use your standard keyboard shortcuts.

#2 — Updated keyboard shortcuts

Great news! We’re updating keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicts with some browser defaults as well as align with other tools you might be used to.

One change to watch out for is headings, which will now use Command+Option+1-6 (Mac) or Control+Left Alt+1-6 (PC), since the previous shortcuts conflicted with tab switching in all browsers. You might ask, why "Left Alt"? Well, non-English customers need Right Alt (or AltGr) for accessing extended characters.

Another one to keep in mind is that we changing the shortcut to publish the page to prevent accidental publishing. Now use Command+Enter (Mac) or Control+Enter (PC).

Also, Mac users rejoice! Command+Shift+Z will now Redo, though we're also keeping around Command+Y for those that know it.

Chrome users on both Mac and Windows will now be able to “Paste and Match Style” by using Command+Shift+V (Mac) or Control+Shift+V (PC).

#3 — Auto-formatting: Wikimarkup is out, Markdown is in

Auto-formatting is the term we use for inline formatting. For example, on a new line typing an asterisk then a space instantly creates an unordered list. We’ve been using “Wikimarkup” for years, but the world has standardized on Markdown, and now, so have we. 

Some key gotchas are that _word_ and *word* are italics and **word** and __word__ are now bold. Another is that “# “ will create a Heading 1. To get a numbered list, use 1. or 1) .

More details about the above mentioned updates on shortcuts and Markdown can be found in the documentation.

We are gradually rolling out the updates to our editing features so expect to see those on your Confluence instance in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to comment here.

Happy editing!

Phil

[Bruno Miretti]

Please make the "Revert to last published version" button visible directly and not hidden inside the "..." menu. It is already confusing for users not to have a Cancel button. In fact there's enough place a the bottom right of the window to have all options available immediately, no need to have a "..." menu most of my users do not use as for them, Close = Cancel

[Eric Hausen]

Not a fan of you eliminating the Undo option from the toolbar, not everyone uses shortcuts for everything, used to using that toolbar option in Word.

Also noticing a bug when pasting copied text from Word: the editor is stripping out any text after a bolded word at the end of a list item.

For example, the original list item in Word would be "Click the Submit button," but only "Click the Submit" appears in the editor.

[Bruno Bronosky]

Just using markdown to trigger a WYSIWYG editor is not good enough. I have hundreds of hours invested in my Stack Exchange answers and questions because it works. I have numerous hours of unpublished/draft documentation in confluence because I cannot get it presentable.

You must give us (cloud/hosted customers) the ability to edit the Markdown. The #3 auto-formatting animation in your post looks horrifying. It combines the worst aspects of both "markup" and WYSIWYG. To avoid what you are doing is why John Gruber invented Markdown.

What you show in that animation is "immutable markdown" that requires you to type it perfectly the first time because you cannot edit it afterward.

I will gladly test your new editor and record screen capture video (with audio) of me trying to use it.

[Jason Tolotta]

@philoye

> #2 — Updated keyboard shortcuts

I can only say that it is a teething problem for me as CTRL+1 now defaults to the browser behaviour of moving to the first tab.

I lose focus of what I am doing since I accidentally flick between tabs.

My fault for developing a habit using a software for years.

I guess there was someone that liked to swap tabs using the default browser hotkeys while editing that made this suggestion.

> #3 — Auto-formatting: Wikimarkup is out, Markdown is in

Bold no longer works for space separated words, e.g. **Table of Contents** and __Table of Contents__ don't bold.

Also, I can no longer create links by just typing.

If indeed this now uses the standard markdown format, why doesn't [Go Search It on Google](https://www.google.com) convert to a link?

[Bonnie Humphries]

Atlassian has been doing some pretty dumb things lately with the user interface and making assumptions about how the users use it – but seriously, this is the dumbest to date. If your users don’t use keyboard shortcuts, how on earth are they ever meant to work this out? I can’t believe someone thought it was a good idea to remove a single button and replace it with a back-in-time keyboard character-combination.

It seems every UI change Atlassian makes is degrading this product further and it’s becoming EXTREMELY difficult to keep up with my users asking how to do things that were previously reasonably intuitive.

The good news for me is that Atlassian is making so many of its loyal customers unhappy that many are looking for alternative products, and I’m hoping that there will be a good alternative shortly. That being said, I don’t trust that any feedback provided to Atlassian has been appreciated or shared with anyone who can actually make a difference to salvaging this product as the detrimental UI changes have been going on for months and no-one has done anything about them.

If you're up to it, take a look at the comments on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56841 - and the lack of response.

New motto for Atlassian - don't listen / don't care

[Normand_Carbonneau]

Phil, I have to say that the new toolbar change is really, really bad. The icons were sharp and easy to recognize before. Now, they are small and fuzzy. And why would you want to hide buttons??? Most of the people are now using wide screens, so, USE THE SPACE!

And the worst decision ever by a company: Completely remove the undo, and force users to use keyboard shortcuts... Well, this proves that you guys are TOTALLY disconnected from our reality. We have geeks in our organisation too, who do not care about buttons because they use keyboard shortcuts. But we are also sharing Confluence with our customers, who are NOT at this level at all. Some of them do not even know what a keyboard shortcut is! So, how on earth can it be a good UX if there is no button, and the only alternative is using something they don't know exists??? Never heard about the word "intuitive"?

Don't get me wrong here. I am the person who brought Atlassian products in our organisation several years ago. I have always been an Atlassian advocate for years because I thought (at that time) that JIRA/Confluence were great products. But the fact that Atlassian is making so many dumb decisions recently, and their total lack of respect for their customers is making me doubt now about the future of your products in our organisation. For JIRA, this is done, we cancel our licensing next month, and we found an alternative, connected to our real world needs.

For Confluence, I can't tell yet, as the migration is more complex. But the removal of the left tree was your last move that makes me hate working in Confluence now. Worst, the total lack of empathy from Atlassian from thousands of people commenting and saying that this new "No Tree" UX is a non-sense. You guys are right, we are all wrong... Let's see how fun you will have messing up with the UX without customers.

[AAA]

Why are you guys destroying a great product like Confluence with new "features" that no one has asked for?

The "old" Confluence was great - the new Confluence feels like it is in a never ending BETA phase that offers way less than before or then one has suddenly to pay for a feature like color spaces (in order to seperate them). Is this really the way Atlassian wants to keep their users happy?

[3Delight]

Hello Phil,

I have a about 15 years of experience writing documentation. Technical, marketing, functional, etc. I am also a senior programmer and I lead a small team of people. We chose Confluence many years ago, and we were relatively happy with it. It's not perfect and some choices are wrong (markdown should be there, its crystal clear, especially that the rich text editor is plagued with problems that are still not solved after years; never too late to admit a mistake and make a U turn) but in general, one could produce nice looking documentation with some effort. 

Recently you have introduced, in a very weird manner, your last update (with a half working opt out that is not an opt out). I am must tell that we were shocked by:

1- How much worse it got.
2- How little knowledge the Confluence designers have about what matters in a documentation. 
3- The zero improvements in the rich text editor, bug wise (it's the big elephant in the room).

I know it sounds harsh but its the case. Two side bars (?!), useless meta-data information right there at the beginning of each text ( "Last modified" with a faceless icon!), page tree not available in the root of the space, colour schemes gone, confluence logo everywhere, confluence home accessible from the left bar (?!), etc!

I understand how tiresome it must be to hear all this. We get such reports from our clients for our own product, and it's not nice. But we act on it.  

You have a lot of work ahead of you to fix everything that has been broken. Reverting all your changes would actually be a huge step forward ! You can even market it as an improvement. Sadly, it's not even a joke. 

Aghiles

[Helen Griffith]

Hi Phil,

These latest changes/improvements don't bother me much but, in general, the new UI is diabolical. Not being able to customize the side bar (other than show/hide the calendar/blog etc.) is terrible. I had struggled with it before but had overwritten the default side bar with an include page so that I could add 'headings'—I have a large customer-facing product documentation space that covers several products which needed some kind of separator. ANYWAY, the comment from 3Delight ^^^ covers pretty much all of my main issues...

I have posted tirelessly of late about my extreme hate of the product in various different community threads and JIRA tickets but I doubt that anything will change...

I might count today how often I swear at Confluence while I use it!

I wish I could be more positive about your new changes, but the best I can say is 'Markdown is a nice addition, but you can't polish a ....'.

Helen

[Bruno Bronosky]

Last night I decided I'd try Confluence again. I spent 4 hours trying to draft the document I wanted my team to use. I finally gave up and created a Google Doc in 10 minutes and emailed it out.

It's insane how needlessly difficult Confluence is to use. If Google had a Jira alternative, it'd be lights out for Atlassian. Luckily, you haven't destroyed that product. But that's not going to float you much longer.

[Randy]

Is there a way to preserve the Markdown syntax or export the Markdown of a page for round-tripping/sharing Markdown between Confluence and other applications?

[Steven Behnke]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg

[Steven F Behnke]

Why aren't people's complaints being addressed here? Is there any point in adding feedback to this thread? Or does it just die here?

[Jason Tolotta]

Feedback for the Founders

Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes are ready to believe you.
https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

[Calvin Bui]

Why doesn't Confluence Server support markdown natively like Confluence Cloud? It's still using the Wiki editor. There's some fragmentation here...

[Sinclair]

I've tried the New Improved markdown functionality in Confluence Cloud and turned it off because it was causing more problems than it solved.

I'm having constant issues with tables where cut and paste will sometimes work, but mostly either copies text, nothing or inserts blank space.

Bullets are also an issue regardless whether the markdown editor is off or on - if they start indented, pasting often gives me a rogue bullet which I have to then remove by reformatting the entire list.

And FYI, support got back to me several months ago and said these were "known issues". Still not fixed though!

I get there's a queue of issues. I don't get how a billion dollar company like Atlassian can get their editor so messed up? Surely it's core functionality?

[Des Owens]

I understand that the new editor doesn't yet support video embedding with HTML or other macros - [confluenceUnsupportedBlock] message.
Can you tell me when this is going to be fixed? It's important for a project that we are currently working on.

Thanks