Full width mode is now available for the new editor in Confluence

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 24, 2019

Hello Community,

Avinoam here from Confluence Product Management.

We heard that you want to control your page margins – rather than having to stick with the current, fixed-width content area.

So, we added a toggle that lets you extend or contract all the elements on a page.

full width.gif

You can also individually control the width of tables, the columns in the available page layouts, and most macros.

While we were at it, we explored which actions are used most when actively editing a page and made these improvements:

  • Shifted the page Permissions action closer to the Publish button. Those actions are most likely to happen when making the content available for others.

  • Grouped page-level actions like Move Page and Add Labels in the three dots ( ... ) menu as those aren't as crucial when editing a page. You'll be better equipped to determine the page's location and labels after you are done working with the page content.

There are scenarios in regards to full width that aren’t supported yet, which we’ll be prioritizing and would love your feedback on:

  • Copying a full width page will copy as fixed width, which can be then set back to fixed width. Ideally this will change to persist the full width selection from the copied page.

  • Custom templates can’t yet be saved as full width by default. You’ll still need to set them to full width. Ideally this will change to be configurable upon a custom template creation.

  • All system provided template will open as full width by default. Moving forward we’ll be evaluating the ability for specific templates to be provided as full width out of the box depending on their use case.

  • Full width can’t yet be saved as a space or user level setting. I.E. a user or admin can configure that all their pages will open in the editor by default in full width. This is also something we’ll be evaluating more closely moving forward and which we’d love your feedback on.

To read more about the new experience, visit the documentation below:

We hope you enjoy using the new Confluence editor. If you have any questions or concerns, please leave us feedback in the comments below or within the edit mode.

28 comments

Merve Nur Bas
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July 25, 2019

Hey  @Avinoam

 

great feature. What Confluence (Server) version supports the new Editor?

My best

Merve

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 25, 2019

@Merve Nur Bas Confluence Server currently doesn't support the new editor that is being rolled out into Confluence Cloud. That may change in the future but isn't on the roadmap as it stands.

Thanks,

Avinoam

Like paul.podgorsek likes this
John Fenger July 25, 2019

Great to see a more clear road map for getting us back to a functional full width.   

  • Templates are key to us and a real challenge that they don't yet work. 
  • We are a max width by default company so all users would appreciate that default being switched around. 

The only thing i don't see is making full width actually fully responsive max width right now its not really full width its just wider... which is better, and again we are a company, like most modern tech companies full of at min 24in 4k monitors. and we like to build tables and take up that space.   

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Sangyeon Won May 3, 2020

I agree, this width function should also happen at template level rather than at publish level.

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Aleksnadra Klusinska July 29, 2019

Will this feature (full-width option) will be available in already created docs - to edit its layout,  not to recreate 500 pages?

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
July 29, 2019

@Aleksnadra Klusinska absolutely. All new pages and existing pages created with the new editor have the new full width toggle so you can easily just make an existing page full width by clicking it.

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Aleksnadra Klusinska August 13, 2019

I moved my wiki from server confluence to cloud and I cannot see full-width option in the menu when I'm editing pages. 

no-full-width.PNG

Nicole August 13, 2019

I was told by Atlassian support that if you used the old editor to create pages you will not have the full-width option and either need to recreate the pages (not really an option for us since we moved our site into Cloud Confluence) and have redirects in place) or wait until they "retire the old editor and renderer" and that they are "highly confident that the pages will eventually be converted automatically." I was given no indication of when this might happen. Very frustrating!

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 13, 2019

@Aleksnadra Klusinska that looks like the old editor where all pages full width by default. 

Aleksnadra Klusinska August 19, 2019

How can I switch to new one -  those pages were moved from server Confluence?

Aleksnadra Klusinska August 19, 2019

I have a new editor when I create new pages. 

Abdelmajid Souid July 31, 2019

Hello, 

how can we enable the new editor in confluence , is there any configuration to make ?

Regards

John Fenger July 31, 2019

If i were you I would wait until its done, as it stands now i feel like a tester of a pre-beta product, and we just copy and past old pages to keep using the old editor/page style.  If i could turn it off and go back to the old editor my company would be so, so, so much happier.  Unless you use it for very simple text only, no tables, or text colors or macros or page properties or images and mainly on mobile with the most basic of un-formated text editing... then you know your likely fine to switch.  you know like old school twitter... then you know, you are golden. 

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Charles August 12, 2019

It appears that template pages cannot go full width.

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Charles August 12, 2019

I'm happy to be wrong here - please advise.

Like Joseph Ishak likes this
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 12, 2019

@Charles unfortunately I can't correct you - yet :)

In the post I tried to cover this (and other things to come) "Custom templates can’t yet be saved as full width by default. You’ll still need to set them to full width. Ideally this will change to be configurable upon a custom template creation."

 

We'll be adding more capabilities to full width on an ongoing basis moving forward based on all the great feedback we're getting.

Charles August 27, 2019

Thanks. I'm sure you aren't short of opinions on how to design software (tragedy of your vertical I guess)

I was just surprised that there isn't more of a connection/reuse of code between the formatting of the various page flavors, especially templates.

Please update when its fixed. thanks!

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sbohmig September 5, 2019

We moved from server to cloud and ran into this problem. It is astonishing that changing width is impossible with templates. Adding such a feature to templates seems to me more important than being able to do this page by page.

What is the release date for enabling this in templates? Thanks!

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 5, 2019

@sbohmig while I can't share an exact date I can share that it's feedback we've taken in and are working on including.

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Tom January 21, 2020

We use templates heavily and this missing option is onerous for us.  We really should be able to set a template to a given width setting.

 

Not to seem too critical, but before they rolled out a controversial editor that many are unhappy about, they should have at a minimum have made sure that existing users would not be negatively affected.

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Kyle February 5, 2020

@Avinoam is there a confluence cloud product suggestion that we can vote up and follow for the full-width templates? I made my first template that would benefit from being full width so I want to pay attention to that implementation.

 

Thanks

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Richard Amery March 31, 2022

I find this totally unacceptable.  These are basic requirements. Do they not speak to their customers?

How has this gone through quality control?

Absolute madness!

Like Chris Stein likes this
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 5, 2019

Quick update, based on your feedback we've added a setting that will allow you to state that you want all your new pages to open by default in full width.

To enable this, go on the bottom left of the nav bar to your user icon > click Settings > click Editor > click Edit > check the "Enable full-width as the default for new pages." box > click Submit.

Next things we're working on for full width improvements:

  1. Allowing to make custom templates full width.
  2. Making certain system templates/blueprints full width by default.
Rachael Collins September 25, 2019

This is great! Any way to make this the default for all users / the space?

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 26, 2019

Yes @Rachael Collins ! 

 

To enable this, go on the bottom left of the nav bar to your user icon > click Settings > click Editor > click Edit > check the "Enable full-width as the default for new pages." box > click Submit.

Rachael Collins September 26, 2019

As an admin, I would like to enable this for all users, not just me.

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 26, 2019

That's a very valid point @Rachael Collins . We've been looking into both and essentially both levels enabled can create some clashes in settings. Ultimately being this change was mainly purposed towards the author of a page we felt the first step made sense to be at the user level, also since that's where a lot of the feedback has been coming from. With that being said, adding it as a space/site level setting is something we're gaining more feedback on as we go along with more improvements we're keeping track of.

Tan Quach March 2, 2020

Yes, I would like to make full width setting a system-wide setting. It's inconsistent that people are able to choose between full-width and fixed-width if you want to have a consistent experience across all documents.

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Sangyeon Won May 3, 2020

Why can't we just make this adjustment at the template level so every template will have different width option rather than forcing every template to have set width? Thanks.

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Susan Colm July 31, 2020

Adding my voice to the need for a space-level or system-wide setting that makes full-width the default for new pages.

Like Chris Stein likes this
Jørgen Flobak September 19, 2019

thanks for the setting, but this is not full width:

full page not.png

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Peter Notenbaert August 13, 2020

They should have called it, (a bit) 'wider' instead of full width...

So much white space being wasted.

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Mark Brunwin October 7, 2019

Simple question - I have tried the new editor and although the width adjustor is available to make the page full width, what I can't do is select a SINGLE column, which is what we use 80% of the time in the pages on our Cloud site. There are 5 column layout choices, but not a single one (see screenshot).

This was the default in the old editor, and yet it seems to have disappeared in the new editor! As a result - if we use the new editor, we lose 30% of the real estate - which for pages with wide tables (such as meeting-notes template is a real problem and a backward step). Screenshot 2019-10-07 at 10.12.35.png

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Sóley Lúðvíksdóttir December 5, 2019

I'm running into the same problem, why isn't it possible to choose a single column layout anymore? 

When can we expect an answer on this?

Sangyeon Won May 3, 2020

Yes, as well as single column, I would also like to see multiple column added in. As there are cases where you will need more than 3 columns in a page.

Is there any ticket that can be followed on this? Thanks.

Mike Bowen
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October 8, 2019

How does one see or get the new editor to load for my Cloud Confluence? I am looking at screenshots attached in the comments above, and your screens look different to mine. I also don't see this button to make the page full width or not? (I did switch off Full Width in the Settings - Editor area. 

Some other things I notice the font icon doesn't have the coloured underline. Here is what my confluence looks like: 

Confluence Editor.pngThe full width option, does this apply to Confluence pages that are external facing for our customers who log in via customer portal? 

 

Mike

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 8, 2019

@Mike Bowen the new editor is going through a gradual rollout so it may be you haven't gotten it as your default option just yet. In the meantime you can try it in 3 places:

  1. Blogs
  2. Meeting Notes
  3. A blank page template

If you want to accelerate the rollout to your site you can open a ticket with support here https://support.atlassian.com/contact/

Thanks,

Avinoam

Milo Grika November 14, 2019

Both modes cause a large Page Properties Report to fit to the page which means that each column might be 1 character wide.

Luckily I was able to use the (soon to be removed) legacy template which displays the Report properly.

Will the new "wide" mode be fixed to account for all basic macros?

Niko Antonogiannis November 15, 2019

Hi Avinoam,

In our new company's Confluence instance we no longer have the toggle that lets you extend or contract all the elements on a page.

I previously laid out my pages with the fixed width and were fine but now in the full-width they do not look as good.

Is there any other way to reduce the width of the page?

 

Kind Regards,

Niko

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 15, 2019

@Niko Antonogiannis I'll follow up via email :)

Elle Allen February 7, 2020

The template full width by default is a very important feature for us - is there a place this aspect is garnering interest?

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Heather Austin April 2, 2020

The template full width is important to me as well. 
Would be great to have the full width available for the heading of the template, currently I can only change to full width by editing a page that has been created using my template.

Is this getting any interest or likely to be completed soon?

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Peter Notenbaert August 13, 2020

When would true full width be available. Still so much white space being wasted.

Help Desk November 2, 2020

does full width only work in the editor?  when i publish the page and view the article on the portal, it is not showing in full width.  Confluence Cloud. 

Sergei Kuzmin November 10, 2020

So much traction to get a good feature back after being broken...

Why your UX hasn't checked the feedback for the "narrow" document?

Why having a default wide mode is such a problem? Looks like a simple flag stored in global settings or a flag stored with a template.

Like Chris Stein likes this
Lauranne Sins December 23, 2020

For sure I agree: having the ability to create full width templates is more than a nice-to-have !! Thank you.

Like Chris Stein likes this
Rachel Martz January 5, 2021

Hi. I work in data. The old editor automatically accommodated visualizing data sets and maps that often spanned screens horizontally by generating a scroll bar. I can't figure out how to work past having the table smooshed together into a single, unusable screen. How do I enable a larger table view? Thank you

Thies Uhlenbruch February 7, 2021

Hi, is it possible to have the full width mode in Confluence Cloud as default?

Like Chris Stein likes this
shadi.shahsavani March 5, 2021

Is there no middleway between full width and thin width? At least with tables there are 3 settings. 

My way out used to be to write what I needed in a 'layouts' box and change the width of that but the possibility of having just one column in the layouts box has been removed.

AND there is no longer any easy way to move the layouts boxes up or down... *sigh*

 

It was one of the most useful features, allowing for easy-ier text mobility.

The new confluence messes up so many good things. Feels like working with half a confluence. Why would you mess up a good thing?

At least you could have let ppl choose between the old view and the new one until....

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Marco Rappe May 5, 2021

Is there a feature request for changing width in Templates, yet? 
Comments here and otherwise suggest, that this feature is sorely missed since 2019!

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Chris Stein May 10, 2021

Please, please, please let me change the default from fixed width to full width.  The use cases for fixed width in my organization are close to zero - 99% of our documents need to be full width and it is an annoying extra step with onboarding new or infrequent users that they have to look for this little control on the page to get the space they need and they can't figure out "what they're doing wrong."  Whoever is going to respond to this with, "all you have to do is... blah, blah, blah" it may not be a big deal to you but think about the friction you're creating for those users on the periphery--they are just as important to the success of your product as your power users that you prefer to cater to.

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Geschäftsstelle September 17, 2021

@Sharon Tan @Eric Le 

Where is the Full-width by default?

Nobody uses fixed-width! It's annoying!

Cameron Kirby September 30, 2021

Hi @Avinoam 

 

Just jumping in here after discussing this with a colleague. I prefer fixed width as I find it makes most things easier for me to read (I think it's a dyslexia thing). But my colleague really prefers full width as that's easier for him to read.

Can we make this a user preference rather than a document preference? As far as I can see confluence does a great job with it's responsive UI and changing between them doesn't cause any document breaking issues. So why not let users view it the way they'd like?

Marco Rappe December 10, 2021

Very interesting take. This would make a great accessibility feature! 

I assume you can construct documents that will break, if forced to a smaller width. And I further suspect they can not be identified automatically. But as an opt-in user preference (with a little notice saying, this will break some documents, turn on at your own risk) that would be great!

Chris O'Hare February 2, 2022

Agree with the comments above, definitely personal preference on the fixed vs full width. Being able to set a personal/per-use default would be great.

Furthermore, one thing I think that's missing (and a few have mentioned above) is the option to have a middle width, wider than fixed, but shorter than full.

Most screens these days are pretty big but the fixed width is still quite thin, and the full width is almost buffer-less (i.e. too wide for some tastes) - having a "middle" width (70%? something like that) would be really nice, please!

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