The Confluence editor is TERRIBLE. What can be done for cloud/hosted customers?
Asked by Bruno Bronosky:

**Does this feature cause more work than it saves?**

This is a question you should always ask yourself. It is clear that the Confluence editor team has never seriously considered this.

The Confluence editor regularly creates 12 times as much work for me than a plain text document. Where possible I write documentation on Stack Overflow or create a gist on github and link to that. I have many unfinished documents that never get published because I can't get the formatting to not suck.

What can be done? Why does Atlassian not do something about this? There is no way that they use internally, what I am paying for, without hating it.


Answers:
author: Ricardo Clements
body: I would assert its not anyone at Atlassian who should be asserting what paying customers confluence sites look like. Imposing a layout, removing tools to design layouts as desired is simply a disregard for your customer base. Whomever is driving customer experience should be taken to task. This is not Wordpress!

I have been watching the evolution of Confluence since very early on and progressively the tools to fully control how content is presented and ability to nuance structure erode with each successive release. First you introduced the Wysiwig editor (and kept the wiki markup (a la C2.com) but then you changed your storage format and too bad for those who liked wiki markup. Then the macros slowly started to disappear.. etc. etc..

If the desire is to provide layout options to the user base that's one thing but forcing a single view and removing the ability to control layout and related tooling creates discontent for your loyal fans. Making it easier for some at the expense of removing tooling that has built a loyal fan base is a questionable strategy which could come back to haunt.


author: Bruno Bronosky
body: The bug is that no WYSIWYG editor has ever worked. They all fail. A rich text document is a data structure. We need to be able to see and edit that data structure in order to effectively communicate our intend to the rendering engine. If that data structure is Markdown, let us see and edit the Markdown. If that data structure is HTML, XML, or something more unintelligible, we need to be able to edit that (however, you may want reconsider how you store your data).

What you must not do is rely on inference of intent. You cannot accurately infer. You must empower us to tell you our intent.


author: Jeff Kelley
body: Agree. The Confluence editor is HORRIBLE. Almost unusable. Really thinking of scrapping Atlassian entirely over this one issue.


author: Bruno Bronosky
body: I don't care about wikimarkup versus anything else. What I care about is precision. If I, as an engineer, cannot specify to your application precisely where I want formatting to start and end, then your editor is not suitable for *everyone* . I would posit that it is *not suitable for anyone* because I don't know anyone who will exert as much effort to solve a problem as I do. This editor is suitable only to *those who settle* for what they cannot change. If you want your tools to be accepted by people who write software for a living, you cannot say to them, "those same pseudo-technical people you argue with in meetings were struggling with the editor so we brought it down to their level by stripping away what made it useful to you.

By the way, if I want to `insert an inline code block`, I'm going to do it whether your tool allows me to or not.

1. If I want lists
   * with lists inside them
     * with lists inside them
2. Yo Dawg!
3. That's exactly
   * what I'll get

What I'm trying to say is that it is in your best interest that you find a way to empower others and make life easier on people like me while you are at it.


author: Rod Rod
body: This is maddeningly condescending: "there is always room for comment... improvement". Those sweeping platitudes might be informative if your audience is a five-year-old child but it's a terrible dodge in just about any other circumstance.   

Confluence remains the horrible, disorganized tool it's always been and honestly if it wasn't bundled with Jira (a much better offering for its purpose) nobody would use it, even if it was free. To say nothing of the ugly results.   

Is it simply incompetence or indifference to glaring issues? More likely (speculating) a wholly unmaintainable code base that makes extending or improving it a re-write candidate? I doubt it's money, which really leads me to believe the code is an impossible mess.


author: Oscar te Giffel
body: The editor is the most counterintuitive thing ever. I can't type or format anything. For example;

- The undo (cmd + z) does not undo the previous changes. No, it goes 3 changes back???

- When I have a list and I want to remove the indentation of 1 line, it transfers my current line to the previous line. Even if the line above is a code block. It transfers the line INTO the code block. Why would anyone want that? A code block should be a self-contained thing and nothing to do with the rest of the text.

- Inside a code block when trying to select everything with the all known global shortcut cmd + a, it selects everything in the entire page. Why? Just why???? Again it should be a self-contained thing.

- Trying to indent something with tab does not work and you rotate with all the functions in the toolbar. But only when you have an indentation then it does work.

- Lists are just awful. When editing a list it does nothing that you think it does. Backspacing on a bullet point, let's go to the previous line (wtf). And when you try to undo that, it undoes the previous 4 changes that you made.

- The shortcuts for deleting words (alt + backspace) and deleting lines (cmd + backspace) never behave as you want. Deleting lines does not clear the bullet point and deleting words does not adhere to most common word breaks.

I can go on but I'm having a hard time not to curse and scream when thinking about it. It takes me sooooo long to format it. I understand for your average Joe it might work but I don't know if your average Joe is the one you should focus one. I really don't know how people work with this or if the creators even try it themselves. Even writing in HTML is faster and easier than this.


author: Sandy Johnson
body: Phil

I strongly disagree with your assessment. The removal of the wiki markup editor was a HUGE problem for us and has greatly increased the time it take for us to create our content.

If the dual editor has more bugs that is not the user's fault. That is Atlassian's problem and we should not suffer because of your inability to fix those bugs.

I'm sure some users like the new editor, but please don't generalize by saying that this is suitable for everyone because it certainly is not.

Also, your user community board blew up back in then, just as it did a few months ago when you changed the interface for the Cloud users. Unfortunately, your Atlassian's response was the same back then as it was this time around - a little lip service and just allowed time to pass so it would die down.

Thanks for listening to one more dissenting voice.

Sandy


author: Jakub Fiser
body: The confluence visual editor is probably the worst thing I have ever had to use to produce technical documentation. Even the horrible Word does a better job.  

I can't even create a \`preformatted\` text consistently. Sometimes the backticks work, sometimes they dont. Copy-pasting text from other sources breaks the formatting even though it's just two words with no special characters or line breaks.  

I've just spend over 15 minutes to produce two lines of text and still was unable to format it the way I want to.   

Using confluence editor is easily the most frustrating experience I ever had producing a document.  

Please, please, let us write in markdown!


author: Jeff Kelley
body: Numbered lists are unusable.


author: Thommy Bommen
body: I have used Confluence and Jira in most of my consultancy projects since 2007. This is coming to an end unfortunately because of the editor in confluence. We are now not able to link to images so we can actually make pages that look good with clickable icons and the ability to have panel without any icon is gone.. Even at some point we could not even use the full screen for our confluence pages.

These two products are getting worse by each release. It is really sad to see. Reminds me of old IBM development tools that got bloated and worse year after year, and now those tools are dead.

We are now looking for alternatives that can serve us better


author: Jason Farlette
body: Have to agree with everyone here. Most frustrating editor I have ever used! Please fix or replace it!


author: Adam T. Kowal
body: If you find something, please let me know. I have many friends in tech who want to jump ship.


author: NameFILIP
body: I edit Confluence pages in my nightmares..

Please enable the ability to edit the documents via markup for power users when your rich text editor fails.


author: Darrell Cabales
body: I agree, this editor is the worst. I just want to make a nested list. Seems impossible, Reading the comments here make me want to give up.


author: Jeff Kelley
body: This is absolutely the worst document editor I've ever tried to use.


author: Christian Gough
body: The confluence WYSIWYG editor is complete and utter garbage! This has been going on for years! What a complete debacle. Atlassian is completely wrong on this one! I have been struggling for hours to create a very simple document that takes me literally minutes in github. Absolutely unacceptable that Atlassian continues to support this steaming pile of crap. Just read the comments! Everyone hates the editor, wake up Atlassian.


author: Alexey_Badalov
body: So, there were text entry experts who used markup to get their work done and novices who tried to use markup because the WYSIWYG editor was unusable. And Atlassian's solution to the novices' frustration was to remove markup to focus on WYSIWYG? Best case scenario: the novices are happy, and the experts get can't their work done. It's mind-boggling.

I want to edit my documents in Vim. No WYSIWYG will come anywhere close in convenience. Especially not a laggy web app.


author: Trey Wood
body: Could not agree more with these sentiments. One of our project managers has begun an initiative to migrate our github wiki pages to confluence, and the contrast between the two editors, in both ease of use and features, is staggering.

I would not hesitate to describe the experience as "soul crushing".


author: Sean M
body: When I edit a Confluence page, I feel like I'm using some janky 90's software that had all sorts of idiosyncrasies you had to learn to work around. It feels like modern features have been bolted on without making sure they actually work reliably. Does Confluence support drag and drop or not? If it does, then how come what I drag vanishes in to thin air if I drop it in the wrong place? How come it doesn't come back when I Undo?

In certain circumstances, when I click below some text, Confluence puts the cursor at the start of the text rather than the end, defying convention.

In certain circumstances, I can't insert a macro beneath another macro because I don't have anywhere to place the caret. And if I click on the existing macro and press the right arrow key (which I would expect to move the caret to the right of the selected object), well what it does seems to depend on the document structure.

In certain circumstances, something that worked a minute ago will absolutely refuse to work again until I click 'Update' and then 'Edit' again.

The crux of it seems to be that Confluence's editor works fine, if you're editing a blank page or some simple text and headers. But if you actually try to make use of panels, sections/columns (barf) and any other kind of advanced formatting, you will quickly find yourself hitting edge cases and fighting with the editor.

The whole thing needs a rethink. Atlassian put all of this effort into making a custom TinyMCE interface that doesn't work very well, presumably in an effort to force some sort of standardization on the pages.

What they should've done imho is invest that effort into a **live** templating system, supplied some sensible defaults templates for admins to apply and left TinyMCE alone.


author: Bradley Touchette
body: I'm trying to find a solution for this editor, but it's awful. Of the six font colors alone, two are unusable and two are flat-out ugly.

Just curious, Atlassian team... have you received ANY positive feedback? Giving people fewer options for the sake of "conformity" is not only Orwellian, it's bad business. I'm a new employee for my company in charge of creating, maintaining, and cataloguing the documentation for my entire company, and we're so new that I have the flexibility to consider other vehicles for our doc management.

If I can, I'm going to remove Confluence from my company. This isn't just difficult, it's pretty much useless. Never thought I'd say this, but I'm thinking SharePoint is a better option at this point.


author: Adam T. Kowal
body: I have seen Confluence at every software company I've been at. We want to direct executive sponsors, core team members, the extended org and all stakeholders to it. But - for engineers, project managers, product managers, product marketing, QA, doc and more it becomes the great black hole that no one updates or they add content that never is seen again. Maybe our bar is too high because of all the great WYISWG page building tools out there for the past decade, but unfortunately Confluence has become the "thing" you buy to centralize info in a structured way regardless of ease of use. My new team spends a crazy amount of time trying to tweak pages to look somewhat professional. I would have expected this frustrating experience 20 years ago, but in 2019 I am flummoxed. I am sure there are things behind the scenes of Confluence that are beyond my understanding but the reality is that we feel like we are stuck with it. We should not be pulling out hair to create bulleted lists on a blank page, trying to add spaced between numbers items and the beginning of the text, trying to use a layout for your page this is either "too narrow" or "way too wide", trying to reduce the uneditable number of pixel lines/wasted space in the Jira roadmap macro - and that's only the beginning. What ever happened to "drag and drop"? We've followed what would logically be steps to edits pages, sidebars, text, links etc and go round and round to the same dead ends. This stuff should be simple and intuitive. I can more easily create formatted Slack messages than create a simple formatted page in Confluence. Finding good answers in the vast help systems is laborious and most often the accepted answer is incomplete, it points you to somewhere in the product that doesn't exist OR it seems like you are supposed to write code. Maybe I am just not the target customer that work is prioritized for. Then there's all the super basic missing features in "Next Gen Jira", but that a different story. I would be so happy if someone would sell a totally basic structured content tool (replace confluence) that completely integrated with gdocs (the sharing and live editing is unmatched) with something a little more advanced than Trello (basic kanban or scrum with ticketing). Integrate those all without forcing customers to write code to do it and you've got 80% of the capabilities the average customer needs.


author: Vassil Velichkov
body: The WYSIWYG editor of Confluence is actually a WYSIWY\*NOT\*G editor and is broken on so many levels, that it is practically not usable for anything more complicated than writing a flat document with some headings.

1. Copy \& Paste simple paragraphs of text from an HTML page directly in the Editor: INITIALLY the paragraphs look OK, UNTIL you change the "Preformatted" style to "Paragraph" - then new line characters are being converted to "spaces" and all paragraphs become a very long line of text. Seriously? How difficult is to handle all combinations of CR/LF and not screw them up to spaces?
2. Trying to Copy \& Paste simple paragraphs of text from an HMTL page into a Panel widget, BUT paste does not work in the pop-up. You have to insert empty Panel and paste the text in-line in the widget.
3. Numbered lists are unusable (Part 1): you can't break a numbered list and put a widget (text panel, code block, etc.) or indented non-numbered paragraph, because the numbering restarts if the list is "interrupted" by a widget or paragraph with different style.
4. Numbered lists are unusable (Part 2): you can't have multi-level lists (e.g. 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2 etc.). If you indent an item it is converted to (a, b, c) list. Mixing Numbered items with Bullets is also not possible. Seriously? Whoever approved this product design obviously has never used any Word Processor app for anything more complicated than writing down a grocery shopping list...
5. Indent a Panel or Code block - INITIALLY it looks like this works in the Editor. Edit the widget settings or save the document the indentation is gone (reset).
6. Should I mention that changing some basic properties of the pre-defined styles is not possible without digging into TinyMCE plugin development? Seriously? HOW difficult is to expose at least basic features that are anyway available in TinyMCE
7. I am afraid even to start describing the horrors with Tables...

There are tons of complicated features in Confluence and some great ideas, but Atlassian screwed-up the basics. How frustrating!


author: Stephan Grotz
body: Been a confluence user from the start - but not been using it for a while. The new editor is utter utter utter garbage. Confusing and really difficult to do simple things?! What happened to simple markdown-language?

Quite disappointing with a tendency to use another wiki tool for our purposes.


author: Steve Douglas
body: It is obvious that Confluence can give a rats @55. They haven't responded in months.


author: rhainesbrainshark
body: Joao, what does MSWord have anything to do with the confluence editor?

People aren't complaining that the new editor is too complex. They're complaining that it is actually just broken. Because it is, completely broken.