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

[Max Arndt]

Why don´t you offer the possibility to choose between your WYSIWYG editor and a simple markdown editor?

I´m new to Confluence and it is terrible! It takes ages to do basic formatting and the worst is the buggy layout options which let you create sections which can not be nested but sometimes they just disappear when saving changes in another part of a page.

[Alan Wendt]

This Fortran program may contain a syntax error somewhere, please rewrite it said no compiler ever.

[Javanaut]

I think an API or an plug-in based system is needed here. This would allow the user to use the current editor (which has a lot of issues), the classic version using markup and creation of custom editors based on tinymce, ghosttext and other would be possible. At least an option to choose between modern and classic is mandatory.

[George Roman]

I don't understand why every page has to support dual modes.  When I ask to create a new page, why not have two icons: "Blank WYSIWYG" and "Blank Markdown" (or even better: "Blank reST")?  From then on, the page type is set in stone.  This should make things easier for the back-end to render pages and alleviate a lot of the glitches we're seeing.

[timfurry]

I've had fairly good luck creating raw list markup in a text editor (a la VSCode), and then inserting it into Confluence's rich text editor via Insert > Markup. Nested lists created directly in the RTE fall apart when the browser is resized. Using this method for some reason creates something different and it works well even when the browser is resized.

* Level 1 entry

** Level 2 entry

** Level 2 entry

* Level 1 entry

Etc. The imported lists then seem to remain stable when edited directly in the RTE.

[Saurabh Hirani]

Is there an official plugin that allows users to just choose their editor of choice when creating a page in Confluence? 

[Daniel Baron]

Where did you find that and what version of Confluence Server/Cloud are you using?

[Mike Murray]

I recently found the updated editor option and admittedly it is much better.

[Steven Knudsen]

Ha Ha Ha... even here things are broken. When I made the reply above, my name was shown. Now I am "full_name", though I think it should have been spelled with an 'l' instead of 'n'

[frank]

i want so much to like confluence because of how well it can solve some problems but the stone age formatting capabilities makes it a hard sell. then the world of macros and add-ons that would make up for the deficit are essentially not there due to the unrealistic permissions requirement that prevent many cloud users from having access to them. so it's rather a shame to see Atlassian being blind to an enormous market opportunity .

[Justin Cimino]

We just use Google Docs for collaboration and use Confluence cloud to publish. However, we are looking at other options as we keep running into unforeseen obstacles - base functionality are paid for add-ons, just learned anonymous access to Confluence doesn't play well with Jira access, etc.

[Ryan Stokes]

completely useless - google docs it is - such a shame to go to that length and make a complex service and then not be able to add some <br> tags in to a document. waste of time!

[streamlineNM]

Confused: if I have to link a Jira issue to github so I can make clear communication on an issue description or comment, why would I use Jira as my issue management system? 

[streamlineNM]

Completely agree with the most recent few comments. 

Users should not have to essentially write code to create a description or comment on an issue.

[Alex LordThorsen]

Ah, so there's no scheduled changes to allow editing for of a markup language then?

[Alex LordThorsen]

Any updates on editor improvements?

[philoye]

Thanks @Sandy Johnson for pointing out the everyone is much too strong a word. I would update it to say "to target as many people as possible in an organisation".

Wikimarkup was great for some people, but unfortunately, not so great for many more, hence our decision.

Thank you for the direct feedback, it is important for us to hear it.

[philoye]

[Copying my response to your other post]

Thanks for your feedback about this.

We introduced the rich-text editor as the only way to edit content back in 2011. Our goal then, which is unchanged today, is to ensure Confluence is suitable for everyone in an organisation. We found that editing markup was the number one barrier to adoption.

Before we maintained a dual-editor experience (rich text vs markup) and it caused huge issues for our customers, had even more bugs, and prevented us from introducing advanced editing features.

We still believe we made the best decision based on the feedback we received from the majority of our customers over the years. The rich-text editor is our path going forward.

We know that it our editor isn't perfect, but we are committed to improving it to ensure all teams can collaborate in Confluence.