Provide users with a plain text markdown editor

Hey folks, I am a Product Manager working on our cross-product cloud editor and want to provide an update to this request.

TLDR

At this point in time, we have no plans to provide users with a plain text editor. I will be closing this ticket as “Won’t Do.” I know this isn’t the outcome you were hoping for. Some context regarding this decision is shared below. My team and I however are open to better understanding where the editor falls short for you, and exploring ways in which your core use cases can be supported without necessarily relying on a plain text editor.

One Editor Experience

Over the years, our team has made efforts to build towards a consistent, familiar, and performant editing experience in all our cloud products. We performed extensive research into how our users use our many products together, and found that an inconsistent editing experiences (i.e. Markdown/markup vs rich-text WYSIWYG) when moving across our products resulted in overall confusion and frustration for our users.

We recognise that a number of users such as yourself would much prefer plain-text markup authoring, but the overwhelmingly majority of our customers requested a more modern, rich-text, WYSIWYG editing experience. Unfortunately it wasn’t/isn’t feasible for us to support both experiences, and in balancing the tradeoffs opted to support the majority.

What we do support

That being said, we do offer support for markdown in the cloud editor in a few ways:

• Autoformatting: We allow people to type {}{}thing{}{} to make things bold. We used to use wikimarkup syntax but we switched to markdown because it is an industry standard.Screen Recording 2022-12-21 at 2.18.02 pm.mov
  • You can see these shortcuts in the Editor help menu, accessible via the Cmd/Ctrl + / keyboard shortcut. 
  • Screen Recording 2022-12-21 at 2.17.24 pm.mov 
• Markdown transformation on paste: We let you type/paste plain markdown/markup text into our editor to help with markdown authoring happening outside our editor. Note that the text pasted needs to be plain text in order to trigger the transformation. Copying from the browser search bar is one example of where plain text can be accessed. Screen Recording 2022-12-21 at 2.18.49 pm.mov
• In some server instances of Jira (such as this one), you may still see a "Visual" vs. "Text" selector at the bottom of the editor. There are no plans to support this for the editor in our cloud products.

Marketplace apps

Worth noting that there are also apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace which extend our editor’s native functionality, and may help provide the editing experience you’re after. Here are some examples for macros which allow creation and rendering of Markdown in Confluence and Jira:

•  Markdown for Jira
• Markdown for Confluence 

Opportunities to improve the Editor moving forward

It’s worth acknowledging you all are passionate about Markdown for various reasons. There are benefits which empower you to work fast, and efficiently. Whether it be not ever having to lift your hands off the keyboard to edit content, or copying content across multiple tools with minimal reformatting needed. While we have no plans to bring back the plain text editor, my team is aware of opportunities to improve the editor relating to Markdown to make the editor work for your needs. A non-exhaustive list may include opportunities such as:

• Improving the reliability of copy and pasting of content in/out as Markdown to/from other products
• Addressing Regex parsing gaps which disrupt automation scripts
• Supporting some flavour of Markdown which allow better support for things like lists, tables, and emoji
• Introducing some native Markdown macro to allow for the input and editing of content in the raw, underlying Markdown

Our team has not committed to any of the above just yet, but pending your feedback we may look to split this ticket up into more targeted tickets which are better representative of the exact reasons why the WYSIWYG editing experience may not work for you, and inform our overall prioritisation efforts.

Contact the team

You can book some time with my team and I using my Calendly links below to provide your feedback directly to my team. Alternatively, feel free to reach out to me at eyew@atlassian.com 

• 30min booking link

• 60min booking link

To close this out, I know this isn’t the outcome you were hoping for, but to reiterate as far as our cloud products are concerned, we shipped a rich-text editor to unlock the value of our cloud products for the majority of our users, and there are no plans to natively support a plain text editor for our cloud products.

For now, I’ll be closing this ticket as “Wont' Do”.

Cheers,

Ethan Yew

Product Manager | Atlassian Cloud Editor