The "WYSIWYG" editor for Atlassian (and I use quotes to point out that that definition is left up to interpretation) is, to be blunt, awful. The formatting is utterly unpredictable and being able to perform simple markdowns in certain, basic cases is not even possible. For instance, trying to set text to preformated but only for part of a line is not possible using the GUI. It's either the entire line or nothing. If you attempt to go DIY with markdowns and use braces. this will likely create any number of problems, depending on their proximity to other elements. If you have no other formatting any where near where you are entering text, you can enclose a word or phrase in the double braces and it works, but sometimes the first brace will invoke the macro expectation and you can't get out of it. Sometimes the braces are simply ignored altogether and treated as plain text! Sometimes the end braces are ignored and the remainder of the document is made to be preformated! I am sure there are other neat mutations of formatting that I have forgotten to mention.

The other big problem is with bulleted or numbered text. I cannot even count the problems that relate to this construct. For instance, sometimes you can do a shift-return inside a numbered list which allows for a multi-line entry under a number or bullet, but this will not work if you attempt to format the lines in some way. Worse, if you attempt to use Undo (command-Z) it will not actually undo what you did, but make to formatting mayhem worse! Of course trying to put a picture element or anything else for that matter in a numbered list makes the list start the numbering over from 1. I have found no way around this.

The long and the short of it is I spend more time trying to format documents than I do writing documents and frankly I don't understand how so many businesses put up with it. I supposed they just make their documents basic or just give up quickly when they try to make something vaguely complex and go with something that looks terrible or doesn't make sense. This is invariably what I do now, but after realizing how much time I waste trying to get Confluence formatting to actually work, I have decided to just put stuff in plain text. But even THAT doesn't work because Confluence attempts to "help" you by trying to turn things like numbers into numbered lists or other gratuitous things that I cannot turn off. It's infuriating.

To put it simply, the editor is intolerable, and when you made it so you can't even create documents in raw text with your own markdown code, you took away the ability to do anything useful. What's worse is that all of the great plugins which are available (and usually free) that would otherwise solve most of these headaches (such as the use of a plain text markdown format editor, for instnace), are simply not supported by Atlassian Cloud! Practically none of the useful plugins for both JIRA or Confluence are permitted on AC at all! I even begged my boss to let me set up our own hosted JIRA and Confluence because it's really not hard to maintain, but he pointed out that migration would be a nightmare, and he was right. We are stuck with being stymied by the limitations of AC.

I have talked to colleagues and they all agree that the Atlasssian editor is a nightmare and has been for years, and that in spite of glaring problems, nothing improves and no one has come up with a work-around, at least not one that works for your cloud-hosted services. For instance, I wanted to use Stillsofts Evernote <-> Confluence Sync but of course AC doesn't support it. Then I just wanted to plain markdown editor. ANY editor would do. The only thing remotely like this cost something like $30/month per seat when there are free plain text markdown editor plugins for your own hosted version of Confluence.

The icing on the cake is that Atlassian's own JIRA instance which I am entering this ticket right now has the ability to enter text in plain text or "Visual" or "Text", the feature I have been so desperately searching for for our own instance. How ironic is it that I can do my own markdowns when entering a ticket to complain about how my instance has no ability to enter my own markdowns. I guess this means that internally, Atlassian staff must realize how awful their own product's editor is, but won't show mercy on your own cloud customers by offering it to them. (Maybe you do, but it appears you charge an arm-and-a-leg for it.

Seriously- either fix the editor once and for all, or allow plugins on Atlassian Cloud where other third parties have fixed your bugs, so customers that are forced by their company's policy to write documentation on their central wiki can retain their sanity. Do it for them, if for anyone. Please.