The Confluence editor is TERRIBLE. What can be done for cloud/hosted customers?

[tharbaugh]

I'm supposed to be creating documentation for a meeting.  Instead I just spent the last 45 minutes reading about how terrible the WYSIWYG editor is ... so that I could procrastinate using the WYSIWYG editor because it is so terrible.

This thing is TERRIBLE and it has been ever since it was foisted upon the users under the guise that it would simplify and improve everything.

I can only hope that the horrible editor will cause enough customers to abandon ship that it will force Atlassian to bankruptcy.  Then, whoever buys what remains, can fire all the management and finally care about customers and software that is productive.

[Daniam Ali Castellanos T_]

The year's 2021 .
I have come to the point where I just want to add another complain to this thread.
This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me (even blogspot editor's better), never in my life thought I'd ever feel so dumb and unproductive while documenting.

[Daniel Everett]

Not only is it broken, it takes far longer to produce documentation with a WYSIWYG editor as compared to mark-up (my own experiments say 4-10 times as long).

[Ruud Geldhof]

Does Atlassian use confluence themselves? because its insane how crappy this is. just spent 10 minutes trying to succesfully copy paste a table. 
The UX is a joke and nobody should pay for this.
Confluence: "hey you want to do something with this table cell? here's a menu"
Also Confluence: "Oh i see your mouse is now going for the dropdown menu, let me put it somewhere where your mouse is NOT"
Do you guys have any QA on this? because it's littered with this kind of low quality, low effort nonsense.

[Mathieu Gagne]

Not to necro-post but I completely agree, still a major problem.

[Marcin Kwiecien]

Funny, I was JUST struggling with the same thing :) 
Brutal stuff.

[Tom]

I can deal with a clunky interface, but when it's so buggy I can't even add a list to an existing page it seriously gets on my nerves.
This happened just now:

Edit a page.
Try to make a list.
Everything looks fine.
Hit publish.
First item is completely misaligned.
Hit edit.
Item is indeed misaligned now.
Fix things.
Everything looks good again.
Hit publish.
"This page needs a name"
Scroll up.
THE NAME OF THE PAGE IS GONE!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

As I'm clearly an Atlassian fan, I know this post is probably not going to get a lot of attention from people who are not as enthusiastic as I am.

But, I agree with most of the negative opinions I'm seeing here.

Trying to keep it short, I want my [ links, the full width on-screen, and re-arrangable sections (notably single columns) back.  The latest version of Cloud has removed three of the five things that I can sell Confluence on.  I suspect I'm missing more.

[Alan Wendt]

I've got a page with about 100 links on that need to be changed in a systematic way (think changing .com to .org everywhere).  It would take me a minute with vi if I could export the page as text with markup included, make the edits, and re-import.  In this grotesque editor it will take me an hour.

[Phillip George]

I don't know if ATLASSIAN doesn't care about their customer base or not.

It seems the editing issue has been a problem / thorn for years and nothing has been done to make it better.

I'm sure if the Editing Feature was better, they would have more people using it and more people singing it's praises.

Instead the customers that use this product continue to comment on how bad the editor is.

If ATLASSION new how powerful Word of Mouth, good and bad, influences customers in their decision making to use a certain product, then maybe they would actually do someting to make the editing tool better.

[Saurabh Hirani]

Checked and I am using https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText which does the work

[Joao Correia]

@Bruno Bronosky for how long have you been using Confluence? I'm asking this because recently they tried to deploy a dumbed down Editor and it was a failure, I think in part due to feedback of people who say it was too complex.

If anyone thinks the current editor is too complex what does the same person thinks of the Word Editor? My suspicion is that you haven't used Confluence at all and that kind of feedback makes product owners try to dumb down the product which ultimately results in utter disaster.

I have been using Confluence for technical documentation for the last 4 years and I love the current editor. It's simple, effective, uncomplicated and layouts give you a lot of freedom.

if you want a page to look beautiful its going to give you a little bit of work, but that's it, then you have a template you can reuse many times over.

Try to open your mind a little bit and use the Confluence editor to understand its features. Look at examples and you will see it is actually very effective.

[andro]

I guess this has become of less importance for Atlassian. We see the WYSIWYG editors all over the place, MS Teams is one of those which cannot handle a simple code block anymore. A selling point for CEO-level PPT/Excel operators.

My company is transitioning away from Confluence for technical docs. We are going to use reST, Git, and Sphinx to generate the documentation anyway we like. Partially but not entirely because Confluence has become a time hog and a source of frustration.

I'm still after 5 years of using Confluence from time to time at various places confused why I always get an extra space character at the beginning of a cell in a table. Is that a feature or a bug?

I still like Bitbucket though, hope Atlassian can focus on that one! :)

[Alon Galor]

Agreed. Absolutely horrendous. Can not believe how many customers have to suffer using it. Linking to a gist on github is a perfect solution. Feel free to close the ticket

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yup, this was asked a year ago.  Atlassian has moved on.

[philoye]

Thanks @Bruno Bronosky for the feedback. I'm a product manager on Confluence Cloud and I look after the editor.

The editor is an area of intense focus for us. We are in the process of rolling out some changes now, which you can read more about in this post here on Community.

But we're not stopping there, we feel your pain and are actively working to address it. 

If there are specific bugs, you can help by reporting them via Support. 

[Scott RM]

Thank you to all whose who've commented before me - You have covered so many of the issues I've faced - It's so great to know that I'm not alone.

[Scott RM]

ATLASSIAN, please do something about this editor, even if it's just to make everything monospace font - That would be better than the current solution.

Thank you.

I would like to say more, but I'm self-censoring.

[Mallee Morris]

Long time user of JIRA, but at my new company they want to try using Confluence with JIRA rather than the MS stack for the non-technical aspects of the project.  I can't make my Spaces and Pages look good to save my life.  Layouts that look one way in the editing tool and then completely change when you hit publish, incredibly limited options for displaying links. NO FONT SIZING!  Ridiculous.  I have been wrestling for HOURS with things that I could do in the MS stack in moments and after days of watching videos and reading, I can tell that my pages will always look junky and overly rigid because the editor is designed so poorly.  No one's spaces/pages look very good.  But I saw a YouTube video of the old editor and it looks leaps and bounds better - who goes from that to this?!? I am just incredibly disappointed. I take a lot of pride in my team sites and I am embarrassed by what this is turning out.  

[Alan Akins]

annnnd that is how I found this post.  I have used MD and wiki markup before.  They had their issues, but it was logical and I could usually find a fairly straightforward way to get the results I wanted.  However, with the WYSIWYG, I can't get anything close.  My organization had the self-hosted version and I learned how to format our documentation fairly well using it, but now since we transitioned to the Cloud Confluence it is almost impossible to get anything close.  Now I'm left debating on creating documentation that will be 10x longer since the numbered lists won't work with any other formatting (e.g. expand).

[Alan Wendt]

Oh, you're going to restrict your statement to human beings?

[Theron Lewis]

As a programmer I'm used to writing things using markup of some kind.  In github I use markdown.  In slack I use a version of markdown.  I use Latex, wikitext, html, etc.  Why isn't there a non-visual editor for confluence?  Having to stop typing to grab my mouse and go through selecting text and menus is a huge waste of my time.  Also the markdown import does a poor job, or at least it did the last time I used it.  When will we have the ability to switch between the visual editor and text/markup mode like we can in Jira?

[Peter Van Geenhoven]

I was just editing an analyses document and got the popup to convert my page to then new editing experience....which unfortunately I did ....  Now the screen simply refreshes and dances up and down on my screen, making it a real PAIN to continue working on my analyses.  Is there ANY WAY I can revert to the old editor???

The expand macro's have also changes: if you paste formatted source code, you loose the formatting. On the upside, you can nest a "Code snippet" macro to which they finally added JSON as language.... but the most annoying thing, up to the point of wanting to smash my computer is the jumping of the screen...it is just frustrating...

[Alan Wendt]

It's grotesque

[Sean McMullin]

Great find Daniel, thank you! We used to keep our support docs in a Git MD-file-only repo, and then were encouraged by management to move to Confluence to support non-tech users. Will move back to keeping the docs in Git as the master and exporting to Confluence.