Looks like on August 15, we'll all be forced into the WYSIWYG editor. :(

[Seweryn Kalemba]

Good news! :) The extension has been approved and published to Chrome Webstore: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/better-trello/dnhdnenpngcecekbhklemaidbdpibiae

@Adrian and anyone interested in contributing, here's link to the repository: https://github.com/migteam/better-trello-browser-extension

Please let me know any issues you have with the extension and I will be happy to help.

In the meantime, I'm working on publishing it to the Firefox extension hub.

[tzsebe]

Not all heroes wear capes!

The thought had crossed my mind this was a good opportunity to learn how extensions work, but I guess I'll have to find another opportunity lol

Thanks for doing this, I'll surely be checking it out!

[Adrian]

This great.

I was thinking about doing the same.

But thinking isn't doing.  So I'm glad somebody did the deed. 👍🏾

[Greger]

I am also very sad and worried about this change. Direct input and editing of Markdown in plain text is a key feature of Trello. The entire purpose of __Markdown__ itself is to __not need an editor__.

I have not had time to read all comments here, but I agree with some that auto-formatting is perhaps even worse that Markdown obfuscation. Also there must remain a way to cut/copy/paste the Markdown text to/from other apps.

Regarding % of users who have opted in/out of WYSIWYG... In the __Trello app__ there is __no way to opt out__. This is why I stopped using the Trello app on my laptop and went back to a browser *only* so I could go to the labs page and disable WYSIWYG.

I honestly believe that more users would be happy and fewer would be sad if you simply removed the WYSIWYG editor. In my experience, most people don't bother to format descriptions and comments anyway and it's not for lack of buttons. Anyone can learn some basic Markdown if they want headings, bold, etc.

[Juan Ochoa]

also keep in mind, that most of their tools are not really aimed at creators, developers, etc. Markdown is (as far as I can tell) still a DSL primarily geared towards these folks.

It's been evident to a lot of folks that Atlassian tools are geared toward the middle-management layer these days. Not a single developer or creative I've ever known enjoys working with Jira for example. But middle managers, on the other hand, seem to love it for some reason. Luckily, we recently rejected it at my work this past year ... after management gave it a look for a few months.

I WAS bummed when Trello was purchased by Atlassian those years ago, and knew then that it would eventually become necessary to leave this tool behind. Sad, but no hard feelings.

[JD]

Commonly referred to as "Tyranny of the default"

[Nate Reinar Windwood]

I really hope they lose a lot of users from this. Any WYSIWYG sympathizer deserves to go broke.

[mnicky]

@Caity

There's one question of mine that haven't been answered yet, but maybe I was not sufficiently clear so I will try to explain it more :)

At the beginning you wrote:

> However, that's no longer the case—continuing to support both of these experiences would slow us down—and so we had to make the tough call to remove the old Markdown editor from the small number of people who were still using it.

My question is how should we understand this statement.

One way is that it is a (understandable) waste of resources to support and maintain two editors - the new one alongside the old one.

If this is the case, my question that I posed above is: wouldn't it be possible to incorporate markdown editing into the new editor, so that there's just one codebase etc.?

The other way to interpret your statement, of course, is that it's not so much about two different codebases but about two different ways of text editing, that you have decided not to support. In this case, adding full markdown support to the new editor isn't an option for you (and we'll be sad :)

Can you clarify this, please?

My interpretation was that you meant the first thing (because the new editor already has some markdown support - namely markdown view and markdown input, and so it shouldn't be much more work to support the full markdown editing - but what do I know). And I hoped that you would consider this...

But now I realized there's also the second possible interpretation.

[tzsebe]

@Caity what's the long game here? You had mentioned keeping the old textbox around was slowing you guys down, which is extremely hard to believe, unless the tech was poorly built in the first place.

My bigger concern is that the reason this is slowing you down is that your backend currently has to support storage in markdown AND Atlassian Document Format, and you're trying to make it so there's only a single code/data path.

This would imply that what you're working towards is an end-to-end migration where it's all ADF under the hood.

Since there's precedent for Atlassian making unannounced breaking API changes, I'm concerned about where this is going. There's a version of this where everything is fine, but there's a version of this where Trello becomes truly unusable for anyone not willing to adopt more of the ecosystem (e.g. the API changing to only return the ADF JSON and breaking everyone who was working with markdown at that level).

[mnicky]

Yes, the markdown support _is_ there in some way, they just don't deem it important enough to retain the ability to fully use markdown when editing...

It is actually pretty funny, given how many people must be upset with the change while still continuing to use the product because they have no other choice...

But no, it would be "too costly" for Atlassian to fix this... Okay then.. At least some of us have the freedom to leave for something better...

[tzsebe]

Yeah when Atlassian purchased it, I definitely had a Spaceballs "oh sh*t there goes the planet" moment :)

[JD]

Amusingly, I exported some of my boards (I'm moving to my own product that I'm working on) and it appears that they're storing the WYSIWYG text data in Markdown -- or at least converting to it before export.

[morgenpeschke]

Same.

I've setup folder sync between my laptop and mobile Obsidian using Google Drive and it took about 15 minutes (including searching up how to do it).

The editor switch has been looming for a while, and the absolute menace the Atlassian Editor experience has been in JIRA and Confluence is absolutely not something I'm interested in putting up with when I'm not being paid for my patience.

[tzsebe]

Interesting, when I looked at Obsidian way back when, it was touted as being more about unstructured connections, but now I see they have structure and checklists.

I've been wanting to redo my personal productivity tracking app and decouple it from Trello, so it can work with anything that has the concepts I need (which in Trello map nicely into lists, cards, checklists). This might be a good opportunity to make that refactor, and play around with different storage backends for it!

[8sx3]

the new editor is actually so bad i take my university notes on trello because the markdown editor made my notes look really nice and easy to read but the new editor ruins it all and removes most of the features that made trello special for me... i tried getting used to the new editor and learn it but theres just too much stuff i cant do that markdown can do so now i have to find something similar to trello that has markdown editor and transfer everything :(

[Caity]

@RichardJECooke That's right, that's a read only panel intended to help people copy out of Trello into another app (for example, we were hearing that people using Trello to draft social media posts needed that ability).

Writing Markdown into the editor should auto-convert into formatted text, although pasting Markdown into the editor does not. Pasting formatted text into the editor, on the other hand, should result in the formatting carrying over.

Correction: Pasting Markdown from a plain text editor will properly convert to formatted text. If pasting from a rich text editor, you'll need to paste without formatting (shift + cmd or ctrl + v) and then click the clipboard icon to choose to paste as Markdown.

[Juan Ochoa]

Thanks. Looks like it'll have to be the slow slog and manual way then. Luckily I exported and/or deleted over half my boards a couple of years ago. Cheers!

[Caity]

There will not be a way to go back to the old mode after August 15. I know that's disappointing, so I want to share a little more about why we've made this decision.

At this point, very few people are still using the old Markdown editor. For a long time, there wasn't much downside to keeping it around for people who preferred it, so we were happy to leave it as an option. However, that's no longer the case—continuing to support both of these experiences would slow us down—and so we had to make the tough call to remove the old Markdown editor from the small number of people who were still using it.

I know that this isn't the news you were hoping for, but I hope that helps give some context to this decision.

[Adrian Williams]

That's great @Seweryn Kalemba 

Thanks once again.

Looking at your commit logs I can see you've been a busy man ;)

[Salvador Aguirre]

Default answers in surveys are NOT accurate surveys.

Now that I go back to use trello more I found out this awful change & surely I never checked to disable it, now I'm left with porting all my cards outside of trello.

Anoter -1 for SaaS software 🙃
Or as my kids say:
Huge L

[JD]

@Seweryn KalembaYou are awesome!  Thank you for this.

That a single person could do this in a few hours -- after we've heard how difficult and time-consuming it is to support Markdown -- must mean you have some real super powers ;) :)

Seriously though - thanks again.

[Adrian Williams]

This extension has been a life saver.
I logged in after the transition and was immediately frustrated at the idiotic presentation behaviour of the new editor.  (I want a new line to mean a new line not a paragraph break.  Just give me plain text.  Please.)

@Seweryn Kalemba you have saved me from having to migrate to another provider.  One that let's format text when I want to. Not because I have to.

[tzsebe]

Seems to work great, thanks for sharing!

I have to refresh my page with `ctrl-shift-r` to get changes to stick (regular refresh won't work), in case anyone's hitting that issue in Chrome.

[Adrian]

@Seweryn Kalemba I'm happy to take a look.

Do you have any intention on making the code public?  e.g. Github

[mnicky]

Thanks in advance!

Now, if there was somebody to port this for Firefox... 🙏 🙂