Opt-in alpha test for a new Stacks editor

Question

TL;DR: We are testing our new open source Stacks editor that offers both Markdown and rich text input options. If you’re interested in testing it out and giving us feedback, you can opt in by visiting your preferences page and enabling the Stacks Editor. You can opt out at any time but it will take up to 10 minutes to revert to the old editor. Note, the new editor will only be active when drafting or editing answers on MSE or MSO during the alpha test.

---

About six months ago (i.e. circa July 2020), our product teams and Community team began exploring whether we could bring to our public sites the Stacks rich text post editor that launched on Stack Overflow for Teams (or Teams) over the summer. We’ve been spending that time discussing the needs internally and also talking with some of our most highly-engaged users about the new editor - our Moderators and members of the Charcoal group - to understand what might need to change or be included to make using the new editor an easy change-over from the old editor.

Through this process, we’ve received dozens of answers with ideas for improvements, bugs that needed to be squashed, and UX confusion that needed to be ironed out. We’ve addressed many of the concerns these two groups mentioned and are ready to bring it to the larger community through an opt-in alpha test on MSE and MSO. We are asking for your constructive feedback to see where there’s room for improvement to make it into a tool both people who are comfortable with Markdown and those who may be more comfortable with rich text can use successfully.

Here's what the two views look like - you can click to view a larger image:

The test

The goal of this alpha test is to get an initial understanding of how well this new editor would be received and to also discover any concerns that would break workflows for users who like the current editor or prefer to work in Markdown. We also want to consider users who may not be familiar with Markdown, too, as they make up many of the users on our non-technical sites. This is the first public phase in a process where we hope to fully test and refine the editor so that, when it launches network-wide, people will find it easy to use and to be a major improvement over the current editor.

We understand that rich text entry is a difficult thing to get right and realize that it may take several months to find the right solutions before we can make this live network-wide - and that comes with the understanding that there may be unsurmountable issues - but we feel that working through this process with y’all will, at minimum, help improve the new editor experience on Teams and may end up with a great new editor for everyone to use.

This is part of a multi-part test that will look something like this:

• Initial release on Teams with feedback from highly-engaged users (e.g. Moderators) (Completed Summer 2020). The goal of this was to get feedback and get a good idea of how much we need to change the editor so that it will work for our public platform community. This allowed us to test many (though not all) of the features with a small group of people without impacting the public site.
• Testing on MSE and MSO through an opt-in alpha test. The goal here is to further refine and identify solutions that will help the new editor be openly adopted by users, primarily active members of the community.
• Usability testing sessions with users of several different experience levels. The goal here is to make sure that the features and UX we create after responding to our highly-engaged users is still transparent to others. We’ll watch how users of varying experience levels interact with the editor to identify and make additional improvements with the goal of an intuitive user experience that has sufficient guidance where needed.

As to a timeline, this is expected to take a while to work through. One of the benefits of the alpha test is that people can enable and disable it as they wish. For the rest of 2021 Q1, our plan is to leave the test running so that y’all can try it out in a more long-term way if you wish. While we’ll be fixing major bugs, we won’t be prioritizing new features or adjustments until we start digging into your feedback from this test and the feedback from the usability sessions in the second quarter of 2021. See a bit more on this in the giving feedback section below.

Assuming these tests go well and we find solutions that make post creation and editing easier than the current system, we’ll move into a gradual rollout phase, starting again with MSE and MSO and then to the sites with standard editing tools, reserving the sites with specialized editor add-ons for the end so that we can make sure that their tools work correctly upon launch.

---

Why are we working to bring a rich text editor to our sites?

While there have been some requests for a rich text entry option over the years (this one going all the way back to 2009), there’s never been much support for them from users - in fact, many of the requests get strong disagreement from other users. Markdown is a great tool and many users are or have grown accustomed to it - I admit to regularly trying to use Markdown in rich text spaces. That said, many of these requests have been to replace Markdown with rich text and that’s not something we want to do.

As a platform that is largely used by programmers, Markdown is generally a familiar format for many and they’re very comfortable using it, particularly now that we follow the CommonMark standards. For those who don’t know Markdown, we’ve expected them to learn and we give them some assistance but, in many cases, posts end up poorly formatted and need participation from the community to improve. Many of my edits on English Language Learners are purely to improve post formatting.

Additionally, our editor has been around since the beginning with few improvements in that time, so a major upgrade is in order and, in looking forward, we feel that a redesigned editor using Stacks will be more easily maintained and improved as we go forward.

Teams needed a rich text option

We have a great team who works to enhance the Teams product to meet the needs of companies and organizations who are using it for internal knowledge sharing. One frequent pain point from these users was the lack of a rich text editor - here’s a statement from Ham, one of the Teams developers:

We started building the new Stacks Editor as a response to feedback from our Stack Overflow for Teams customers. While Markdown has become a widespread and successful format for writing content - not only at Stack Exchange but across the web - some of our Teams customers told us that they’re not comfortable writing their content in Markdown. They didn’t know the syntax and faced a learning curve before they could start writing the way they wanted to. Writing questions and answers wasn’t as easy as they were used to from other places. For us it’s important to make contributing as easy as possible. Writing questions and answers should feel natural and come without a lot of friction.

This makes sense. Copy and pasting from a rich text editor like Google Docs or Word is much more common within a company where you may be transferring information from existing documentation to a Team, whereas much of our public site content is created from scratch. That said, it’s not unheard of to copy content in the form of quotes into posts, where a rich text detection feature would be helpful so that adding the Markdown manually wasn’t necessary.

The main driving force for the development of the new editor was to improve the experience of Teams for our existing users and give it a feature set that would attract additional users. That said, since many of the people using Teams are developer-centric groups, they also are often comfortable with Markdown, so we wanted to ensure that both options were available. More from Ham:

The new Stacks Editor tries to be the best of both worlds. If you’re happy with writing Markdown and liked the way the old editor helped you with that, the new editor will feel very familiar. You can write Markdown, use familiar keyboard shortcuts, upload images and more. If Markdown is not your strong suit, Stacks Editor allows you to switch over to the new rich text mode that allows you to write in a more WYSIWYG kind of fashion.

We still think that Markdown is the way to go, but we also see the benefits of a rich text editor for less technical users and/or network sites who may be more accustomed to a WYSIWYG style editing. With the new Stacks Editor, Markdown continues to be the leading format for your content and everything you write will be transformed and stored as Markdown at the end of the day.

So, our focus in building the new editor was to add the option of rich text but still maintain a Markdown focus because we love Markdown and think it’s a great experience for those who already know how to use it and is relatively simple to learn but we also want to simplify or improve the experience for people who may be copy-pasting into posts or who don’t know Markdown.

More than just rich text, we’re simplifying future work for development

The current editor has been around since 2008 and, while we’ve made changes along the way, it’s largely unchanged and now makes building new features difficult. Additionally, by adopting and improving the Teams editor on our public network, we’re simplifying future work on ask, answer and edit pages and maintaining similar features between Teams and the network. My final quote from Ham:

Our old editor has served us well for many years, but due to a number of issues (reverse-engineered code that is hard to work with, inadequate API for handling cross-browser issues, and bare-bones content-editable support) we are unable to use it as the base for any major upgrades. Additionally, there are many advantages from basing an editor on a modern foundation (like we have done here on top of prosemirror), which can take care of many of the nasty "content-editable" concerns and keep things safer and more cross-browser compatible.

Being around for so long, it has accumulated quite some cruft and has become hard to maintain and evolve the way we would love to. Over the past years we tried revamping the editor a couple of times only to find out that it would be too hard to do. When we started building the new editor for Teams, we knew this would be a good opportunity to greenfield a new editor overhaul that would ultimately benefit all our users across the network.

On top of this, we’re opening the editor up for everyone to use and contribute to. Like Stacks, the new editor is open sourced, so if you’re interested in how it’s built or want to contribute to improving it, you can find it on the Stacks-Editor repo.

Building editors is hard - particularly when dealing with rich text

I’ve learned the quirks of a variety of different editors over the years, whether it was BBCode on the forums I participated in, Wikitext on MediaWikis, Markdown here on Stack Exchange, or any of the various rich text or hybrid editors on the various platforms I’ve used (e.g. Jira, FreshDesk)… so I’m comfortable adapting to new styles, but I also find that some editors make assumptions that frustrate and confuse me and make me not want to use them any more. We want to avoid this frustration!

Because our focus is on Markdown, with the addition of special formatting for tables and spoilers, we’re able to limit what our rich text editor has to do - we’re not increasing which formatting options are available (e.g. colorful text or underlines) which is one way we’re working to keep our rich text implementation and the conversion between rich text and Markdown simple, easy-to-understand, and as frustration-free as we can.

The major changes

Other than the optional rich-text entry, there are a bunch of other changes, big and small, that you’ll see in this test. Below are some of the biggest ones including a brief overview of how rich text entry works. A lot of what’s written below was penned by Ben Kelly, who’s done a lot of work with Ham to get this editor going and is supremely knowledgeable of the features, so big thanks to him for that!

Rich text mode

This editing mode was designed to largely resemble traditional word processing software that many users are used to. However, we've added in some extra features:

• Markdown-style "input rules" for block level syntax
  • Typing # , ## , etc creates a header; typing > creates a quote; * creates a list, and so on
  • We’ve got inline input rules (bold, italics, inline code, etc.) on a list of things to investigate for a future release
• Link and image editing tools will allow editing link URLs for links and the addition of an image description and title for images.
• Intelligent copy/paste support - Pasting external content from e.g. Google Docs or code from your editor of choice will retain most of its existing formatting, provided that formatting is in Markdown.

Ultimately, the rich text editor is converted back to Markdown and should support everything you can do in Markdown, with some caveats:

• Pasting rich text from outside sources isn't perfect, especially with very complicated content
• What we can support in rich text mode is restricted by our backing Markdown implementation, so things like merged cells in tables or super/subscript aren’t supported, even when we do support the HTML (see next bullet).
  • This is really more of a feature than a drawback. We <3 Markdown and are committed to supporting it first-class for the foreseeable future
• HTML support is HARD. We make no promises that any HTML written in Markdown mode will be editable in rich text mode
  • We recommend using the equivalent commonmark syntax when available. We’re looking to extend our supported Markdown syntax so users won't need to type HTML anymore.
  • Don't ask why HTML is hard. It's a long story that could be a blog post of its own.

The Markdown - rich text switcher

To allow for movement between rich text and Markdown modes, we’ve added a switch. When the dot is on the right (green background), you’re in Markdown mode; on the left (grey background), you’re in rich text mode. The current default for all users is Markdown but, after you use the editor, the system will remember your last-used option as your default. So, if you submit a post or edit while in Markdown view, you’ll see that the next time you open the editor; if you do so in rich text, that will be the view you have when you next use it. The default configuration for users can be changed per-site, so if a site feels that rich text makes more sense as their default, we can allow for that.

Preview is collapsed into the rich text view

Over the years we’ve gotten lots of questions about whether we could optimize the preview so that it didn’t take up so much space on the screen. If you’ve ever written long posts, you may be familiar with the feeling of doing a lot of scrolling to get from the end of a preview back to the edit window. With the new editor, you see the preview by using the Markdown toggle to switch between Markdown and rich text modes and, because the rich text preview is part of the editor, you can edit right in the preview rather than having to find the edit window again. This is a lot more convenient for mobile users, too, with their smaller screens where scrolling through even a short post can mean a lot of work.

Aaron, our Principal Product Designer for Design systems explains the value of an editable preview:

We think this is more than a layout issue. We could put these previews side by side, or toggle between them like GitHub does, but I think having a preview at all is something we can move beyond. Tiny sidenote: I worked on GitHub’s editor in 2016! We could explore alternatives like having a button that launches a full screen preview, but I think that’s wasted effort when we could be writing directly in the preview experience.

The web has matured past the point of requiring Markdown syntax and discrete previews. Why should any text editing offer a read-only preview state in 2021? Is writing, previewing, noticing a mistake, and moving back to the editor truly better than simply being able to edit the text? Would you accept this interaction model in your word processor? In Notion? In Google Docs? In Medium?

We feel this is a positive change for these and many other reasons but we do understand that it’s a big departure from the current format. Please take some time to see how this new workflow feels and let us know what you think and how we can improve this. I know that many of the prior requests have been for a side-by-side preview to cater to the wider screens that many people have, particularly as this matches many other Markdown editors. Unfortunately, this can be complicated on smaller screens, which would require different placement and it’s pretty common to have previews separate from the entry form, like with GitHub’s two-tab format.

We do have a few known issues here:

• While switching between modes does maintain your approximate scroll position, it doesn’t remember where your cursor was. Any time you switch, your cursor will move back to the top of the post rather than staying where you were.
• There’s no history when switching modes, so flipping between views will cause you to lose the ability to undo/redo the changes from the other view.
• Since the rich text preview will interpret your Markdown, any incorrect Markdown (MD) may be escaped out by the rich text editor. When you return to MD view, you will be able to fix these errors.

Syntax highlighting in Markdown mode

You’ll notice your Markdown experience is a bit less monotonous because it now responds to the Markdown you use by changing the text in the pane - headings will be larger, bold text will appear bold, as will italics, and links will be in blue and code will be in grey. I’ve found this really helpful in drafting posts as it identifies a lot of the Markdown errors I might have made, making it so I’m less likely to even need to look at the preview. This isn’t currently CommonMark compliant but we’re working on improving it.

Changes to formatting buttons

We’ve removed some buttons and added some new buttons to the ones available for formatting. Here’s what the formatting bar looks like now:

Removed:

• Undo/redo - these features still work with your standard key combinations but we’ve removed the buttons themselves - we’ve also improved undo/redo history support to be much more reliable overall.
• Stack Snippets (temporary) - We couldn't get Snippets built into the initial alpha test, so if you need to add a snippet to a post, you'll need to disable the alpha to do so.

Updated / New:

• Tables - this button will create a default three-row, two-column table and have special menu options when in rich text mode that allows adding/removing rows and columns.
  
• Headers - this button has been redesigned and moved to the first position.
• Inline code / code blocks / Stack snippets buttons - one piece of feedback from our early tests was that for rich text, we need to differentiate between inline code and code blocks but on Teams we reused the same icon for code blocks that we currently use for Stack Snippets - to allow all three options, we created new icons. Snippets are disabled for the alpha but you can see the new trio of buttons (left to right - inline code, code blocks, snippets)
  

We're planning to add keyboard shortcuts to the formatting buttons but they aren't part of this initial alpha test.

Markdown mode is your go-to for fine-tuning posts

Markdown mode will give you fuller control of your posts, as it already does. Here are a few places you’ll want to stick to MD when composing or editing posts:

• Adding a language to a code block for syntax highlighting purposes - while we’re looking to add this to rich text, for now it’ll require MD. The system will still auto-detect languages based on tags as it usually does but if you need to call out a specific language, you’ll need to use Markdown mode.
• Markup that requires HTML - we still support some HTML in posts but the rich text mode won’t create it, so if you need to include HTML in your posts for formatting such as subscript or superscript, you’ll need to enter Markdown mode for this.
• Spoilers - like HTML, they're supported but we don't have a button for it, so you'll need to use Markdown mode to add them.
• Creating complex lists - this is possible in rich text mode, but it’s not as intuitive as using Markdown, particularly in special cases such as lists with indented code blocks.
• Fine-tuning images - resizing or adding links to sources or full-sized images will need Markdown mode.

Inline text and image links are the norm

The image and link tools will now add images and links inline rather than in the bibliography format. While the latter will still work, you’ll have to create it manually. Right now, images don’t have their image plus link formatting but we’re working on getting that added in a future release.

How to participate

If you’d like to opt-in to the alpha test, visit your preferences page and opt in by enabling the Stacks Editor opt in option. At the outset the new editor will only be available on answers - you won’t see it on questions, profile pages, tag editing pages or any other editing forms around the site. Opting in is global, so if you opt in on MSE, you’ll also see the new editor if you’re on MSO. If you decide you’d like to opt out, you can do so in the same way, switching the slider on your preferences, though it may take up to ten minutes for the editors to return to normal.

Giving feedback

This feedback phase is an incredibly important part of this process so we really appreciate any of you who take the time to try the editor out. If you run into bugs, usability issues or if you think of features that would improve your experience with the new editor, please leave an answer here - one per answer - so that we can review and respond to each. Steps to reliably reproduce are always appreciated along with which browser/s you're experiencing the bug in, and especially so when it comes to obscure edge cases or subtle usability issues. Additionally, because this project is open sourced, for truly technical bugs, you can file them as an issue on the GitHub repo - if you feel comfortable with that - if we get reports filed in both places, we’ll link them.

Our plan is to transfer issues from our internal system to the GitHub repository and add any new ones that come up here so that anyone who’s interested can see what we’re working on and how we’re prioritizing this work.

While it’s great to hear your overall thoughts about the editor, if there’s too much in one post it can make responding difficult so try to keep each answer relatively concise. You’ll have until the end of the alpha to add the answers here. Once it’s over, we’ll let you know how best to give feedback.

Thanks

This project couldn’t have been possible without the work of so many people and they all deserve a ton of credit. In particular I’d like to recognize Ben Kelly, Ham Vocke, Aaron Shekey, Des Darilek and Adam Lear for all of the effort that they’ve put in. Additionally, to those who have taken the time to test and give feedback while the editor was in Teams only, thank you!

Answer 1

status-completed

Automatic conversion of "straight quotes" to “smart quotes” is catastrophic for code-centric sites.

When in Rich Text mode, the editor auto-converts double-quote characters into “smart quotes”, even for text entered in inline code format, but, fortunately, not in code blocks.

This will cause massive problems on code-centric sites like Stack Overflow, and is likely to cause substantial issues on at least some other sites.

To be clear: at least for code-centric sites, there should be no mode in the editor which automatically converts straight, double-quote characters into “smart quotes”. To have a mode which automatically does that conversion will result in automatic “smart quote” conversion being done to code, which will break the code. Having such a mode will increase the average time and effort necessary for every post in all of original entry, editing, moderation, determining actual issues, etc. Users often enter code as regular text, which they may, or may not, later apply code formatting to, so having automatic “smart quotes” enabled in any mode will cause additional problems. Having such a mode will reduce overall user satisfaction for all code-centric sites, due to the additional issues introduced.

Basically, automatic conversion of straight, double-quote characters into “smart quotes” is a feature about which some people think "ohhh pretty quotes", but which causes fundamental problems for other people (and some people just really, really hate “smart quotes”). Please, please don't inflict “smart quotes” upon us.

Answer 2

status-completed Preview mode is now available
status-planned MathJax is not yet integrated in the new preview mode, but will be included before the Stacks Editor is opened for testing on sites that include preview mode.

Disclaimer:

Let me start off by apologizing for the blunt tone in this post. I very much appreciate the spirit of openness and hard work that underlies the development side, and I want to thank you for both the hard work in improving the UI and for the time and willingness dedicated to soliciting community feedback. I offer this feedback with some blunt edges because it is important -- you're doing great work, but if you don't do that work carefully then there is a clear potential to cause significant harm, and most of the signs I can see indicate that your current trajectory goes towards that harm.

What follows is intended exclusively as constructive criticism, and I hope it reads as such =).

That said:

This change is extremely alarming from a MathJax perspective.

The design philosophy makes a lot of sense for a lot of sites, but several of the proposed changes (specifically, the removal of the live preview) would be a catastrophe for sites where MathJax is a common or essential part of the site experience. As a reminder, this is no less than 42 sites out of the network total of 176, i.e., 24% of the network sites.

^{(Also, as pointed out in the comments, there are several other essential site-specific post formatting plugins which are in an identical situation to MathJax, the clearest examples of which are chess, go, furigana and music notation.)}

Here are the things that worry me the most:

We could put these previews side by side, or toggle between them like GitHub does, but I think having a preview at all is something we can move beyond.

uh... no it isn't.

Why should any text editing offer a read-only preview state in 2021? Is writing, previewing, noticing a mistake, and moving back to the editor truly better than simply being able to edit the text? Would you accept this interaction model in your word processor?

Yes I would. I already do. This is my main mode of work. In my discipline -- similarly to many of those represented in MathJax-holding SE sites -- the industry standard word processor is LaTeX. Having a separate editor and preview is not only standard, it is the only way to work efficiently.

At the very least, building a WYSIWYG editor for math is a major software undertaking. But, to be blunt, none of the existing solutions, with decades of trajectory, make the bar as a professional standard. (For clarity: it would be absolute nonsense to attempt it here.) Editing math absolutely requires a code-and-preview configuration. As such, if your design philosophy is that "having a preview at all is something we can move beyond", then your design philosophy is blind and deaf to the requirements of the technical sites.

I am of course sympathetic to this concern:

If you’ve ever written long posts, you may be familiar with the feeling of doing a lot of scrolling to get from the end of a preview back to the edit window.

and indeed it can be annoying (though, as has been pointed out, not universally). But that viewpoint is missing another vital aspect of how MathJax works on Stack Exchange, and that is the amazing and extreme convenience of having an instant preview rendered alongside the plain-text Markdown/MathJax source. In fact, the current editor is more convenient than the standard LaTeX editors, due to the speed and constancy of the preview refresh -- it refreshes as soon as anything changes, and it is only limited by the (very fast) speed of the rendering.

In the proposed changes (Markdown source and rich-text preview on the same pane, with a button to switch between them), writing and editing mathematics will become noticeably and significantly harder. To put it bluntly, getting rid of the simultaneous preview kinda shafts the mathy technical sites, bigtime.

---

Now, I appreciate the points made regarding the age of the code and the difficulty of maintaining it and of using it as a base for further upgrades. It makes complete sense that there is a need to have a better codebase for the editor, and that it should, at the end of deployment, be used across the board throughout the SE network.

... which is why it is essential that the concerns surrounding MathJax form part of the initial design stage. This:

Sites with MathJax are among the last we'd ship this on

is not good enough. The concerns surrounding MathJax are part of the core design decisions that need to be made. If the plan is to wait until the end, once everything has been hammered out and all of those design decisions are set in stone, and hope fingers-crossed that those decisions will work for the 40+ sites that use MathJax, then the plan reads "we don't care if the mathy technical sites end up getting shafted" to me.

If the goal is to have a single codebase work for rich-text-oriented sites and Teams as well as for MathJax-oriented technical sites, then that jointness needs to be recognized from the get-go: the design decisions regarding the preview need to be made now, and a mathy site (math.se, physics.se, stats.se, etc. - your choice) needs to be among the first sites to test it out.

---

One more thing:

Syntax highlighting in Markdown mode

You’ll notice your Markdown experience is a bit less monotonous because it now responds to the Markdown you use by changing the text in the pane - headings will be larger, bold text will appear bold, as will italics, and links will be in blue and code will be in grey.

That's great! But you also need to turn it off inside MathJax delimiters. Some of those problems have already been pointed out, but I'll say it explicitly here: messing with the formatting like in this screenshot is extremely distracting, utterly useless (in the sense that it is not achieving any of its goals, as it's responding to syntax that's going to produce other output than what the highlighter thinks will happen) and it has no place in a math editor in the 2010s, let alone the 2020s.

Answer 3

feature-request status-completed

Allow viewing the Markdown at the same time as the rich text

Over the years we’ve gotten lots of questions about whether we could optimize the preview so that it didn’t take up so much space on the screen. If you’ve ever written long posts, you may be familiar with the feeling of doing a lot of scrolling to get from the end of a preview back to the edit window. With the new editor, you see the preview by using the Markdown toggle to switch between Markdown and rich text modes and, because the rich text preview is part of the editor, you can edit right in the preview rather than having to find the edit window again. This is a lot more convenient for mobile users, too, with their smaller screens where scrolling through even a short post can mean a lot of work.

As someone who's edited faq posts here quite frequently, I definitely understand the sentiment here. A large portion of my time in editing those was in scrolling back and forth between the preview underneath the post editor and the editor itself.

However, the new editor removes the ability to view the rendered output of text at the same time as viewing its raw Markdown. As someone who frequently makes use of advanced Markdown techniques and subtle nuances (and the occasional HTML) while typing posts, having to constantly flip a switch back and forth every time I want to see how my post looks like is an extreme burden compared to simply scrolling.

This is also quite important because in the current preview, since the rendered output took as much space on the overall page as it would use when posted (slightly less due to the lack of a left margin for voting buttons), this would allow me to get a rough estimate of how long my post is, so I can tune it back (e.g. remove unnecessary details) if it was too long. The new preview makes it much more difficult to estimate how long a post will be on the actual page when posted, which is, again, something I make use of frequently enough to put up with having to scroll.

Again, I definitely completely understand the sentiment behind the way the new editor is designed currently. Having to scroll can be quite difficult for many people, especially for larger posts (e.g. FAQs here). However, I'm one who frequently makes use of more advanced things enabled by the current setup that the new setup would make it more difficult for me.

Can there please be an option to view a live rendered preview of a post at the same time as when typing raw Markdown into the editor? This need not be below the post as it currently is, but please consider this.

---

I should probably note that as a member of a Team, I've had access to this editor for quite a while. I've made repeated attempts to get used to this new workflow, but I'm still unsatisfied.

Also, those looking into this answer may also want to look at two additional answers written by Tinkeringbell, which expand upon the argument in this post.

Answer 4

feature-request status-completed

Feature request opened on GH

I’m not sure all users will understand how the ‘Link selection’ button works. (Hint: you have to select the text first, then the button will become enabled.) Other rich text editors I use regularly have an 'Insert Link' button where you can specify both the link and the text to display.

So something like this (excuse the bad mockup, hopefully the idea is clear):

Or enable the button at all times, and if nothing is selected, ask the user for a link (like the current editor) and insert it, with the popover visible so that users know they can edit both the link text and the link itself:

Answer 5

feature-request status-completed Preview mode is now available

If we can't have the side-by-side preview due to technical limitations, we're going to need a better alternative than the Rich Text mode for previewing our Markdown. Even just another setting or toggle to put a live preview pane below the MD editor (like the preview works now) would be much better than having to toggle between MD and RT editors.

I use the current, live preview a lot when writing posts. When writing regular-sized posts on a regular-sized screen, I keep my eyes on the live preview instead of the editor >90% of the time, probably only scrolling up and taking my eyes off the preview if I'm pasting in an image and the dialog asks me to confirm, or if I decide to add another sentence to a paragaph. My usual workflow includes scrolling down the site to see the live preview over actually looking at the editor a lot of the time.

The post states that one reason the RT editor could be better than the current arrangement is that

With the new editor, you see the preview by using the Markdown toggle to switch between Markdown and rich text modes and, because the rich text preview is part of the editor, you can edit right in the preview rather than having to find the edit window again. This is a lot more convenient for mobile users, too, with their smaller screens where scrolling through even a short post can mean a lot of work.

Toggling between two editor modes to get an approximate idea of what your post may look like isn't a live preview of what you're writing. It slows writing down. And saying that "you can edit right in the preview" isn't actually true: If I'm working in the RT editor, using it as both an editor and a preview at the same time, I can't continue writing in Markdown. I have to switch back, losing my "preview". Honestly, this is less than ideal. While it is less scrolling, it's also not live. And the RT editor does a worse job at showing how a post will look like than the current live preview does.

I like the idea of RT for mobile writing. I rarely use MD anyways when on my phone, just because asterisks, hyphens and hashtags aren't a one-click thing when looking at your phone keyboard. But right now, and most of the time, I'm writing my posts on a computer. This means I have my hands a the keyboard, and a screen big enough to actually show me what I'm doing.

This whole post right now easily fits on my screen. And the preview of it is live, and it's something that I treasure. It makes writing this easier, quicker, more interactive, more fluent. Whatever you do, for those people that do write using the Markdown editor, do not take away our live preview. The Rich Text editor isn't a live preview, switching between the two breaks flow, and you can't write Markdown if your editor is in Rich Text mode while seeing it the result as the live preview allows now.

Answer 6

bug status-planned

Bug report opened on GH

This markdown:

# one heading

## two heading

### three heading

#### four heading

##### five heading

###### six heading

renders this preview in the rich editor:

It gets posted like such:

Answer 7

"Preview is collapsed into the rich text view"

The preview is a necessary part of editing, particularly on some sites, and it is a great convenience to be able to see the entire post and proofread for redundancy.

Enabling the new editor on Meta Stack Exchange breaks the editor on other sites.

Take this question on Physics.SE for example: "How the unitary operator acts on this vector?". Copy pasting the text here shows that without a preview it can be more difficult to read what you have written:

Copying that same text into an answer on the Physics.SE site reveals a rendering issue, without the preview this wouldn't be obvious at first; leading to a lot of additional edits.

See this screenshot (editor enabled on Meta Stack Exchange):

---

---

See this screenshot (editor disabled on Meta Stack Exchange):

-

Notice how enabling the Rich Text Editor caused misrendering on a different site where it wasn't enabled.

Answer 8

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

When using an asterisk for italics, but not terminating it, like *this, the preview shows the rest of the line in italics but the rendered post won't.

Answer 9

feature-request
status-completed Preview mode is now available
status-declined for having an "always start in this mode regardless of my last usage" preference

---

Sonic already wrote about missing the preview function. I do too, but I have some more reasons I miss the preview. Two of them are already known issues:

While switching between modes does maintain your approximate scroll position, it doesn’t remember where your cursor was. Any time you switch, your cursor will move back to the top of the post rather than staying where you were. [...] Since the rich text preview will interpret your Markdown, any incorrect Markdown (MD) may be escaped out by the rich text editor. When you return to MD view, you will be able to fix these errors.

I've used this editor a few times on Teams, and I'm not really looking forward to turning it on here, because it saves the last used option as a default.

My usual workflow goes something like this:

1. Start writing a post in Markdown.
2. Look at the preview to see what it looks like.
3. Repeat 1-2 several times.
4. One final, careful look at the preview before posting.

While I think I may be able to get used to toggling a switch to see a preview (and not having to scroll), the fact that my last-used option is saved is what makes this new editor so frustrating to use.

Usually, my 'step 1' includes a pretty big chunk of text before I even look at the preview. But my step 4 means that every time I post something, I should either a.) return to Markdown mode first or b.) return the editor to Markdown mode when I start writing the next post. And I don't want to pay attention to that toggle, I just want to start writing. Which means I often run into the part where I write Markdown in the rich text editor, then have to switch and delete all the slashes that are now escaping the Markdown:

Is there anything that could be done, perhaps a profile setting, that means I always will start writing in Markdown mode, that will override the 'last-used' setting and perhaps even override site-specific defaults?

Answer 10

feature-request status-review

Feature request opened on GH

Tables - this button will create a default three-row, two-column table and have special menu options when in rich text mode that allows adding/removing rows and columns.

It would be nice to have some way to specify the number of rows/columns at the creation of the table (and not after), e.g. from Google Document:

Answer 11

feature-request status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

I wholeheartedly support the requests to, in some form, allow simultaneous viewing of the Markdown and the preview. If at all possible, I'd rather that be done in some way instead of this. However, if that can't be done...

Toggling between Markdown and rich text to preview the result without editing anything should not be a destructive action

As one of the CMs noted:

I literally do not preview my posts on Teams because I can not take the risk of the RT mucking with my MD

If the user only toggles between Markdown and rich text (for example, to see the preview) without making any changes, then toggling back should remember and restore the exact previous state. It’s understandable that there can’t be a 1:1 correspondence between the two, and that editing something in the rich text view may result in different Markdown upon returning.

However, it should be possible to special-case “not changing anything” and return the user back to the previous state upon return, allowing the rich text editor to serve as a preview of the Markdown.

Answer 12

status-completed Preview mode is now available
status-planned MathJax is not yet integrated with the new preview mode, but this will be done before the Stacks Editor is released on any site that has MathJax

(I apologize for the uneven formatting in this post — it was written in the alpha-testing editor. I’m finding that even when in Markdown mode, the “syntax highlighting” features are too aggressive -- to the point that I am frequently unsure whether I am in Markdown mode or rich text mode. Moreover, the syntax highlighting in Markdown mode appears to be inaccurate. For instance, in Markdown mode, most of the text of this post is currently displaying in bold and italics, contrary to the case in rich text mode or when I publish. For another instance, apparently when I initially wrote three dashes below, at least two of them were written in rich text mode and converted to an em-dash, so that the separating line below initially did not render properly.)

My comments on E.P.'s answer are already overflowing, so let me continue here. I strongly agree with everything in E.P.'s answer. Like E.P., I understand that there is no malicious intent behind these proposed changes and I understand that everybody is here in good faith, but like him I feel that the situation requires me to be blunt. Most of all, I agree with E.P.'s central thesis that

This is extremely alarming from a MathJax perspective.

Moreover, as Rob points out, the issues raised here will likely extend well beyond MathJax, to many other site-specific formatting plugins.

Basically, when thinking about rich text,

The MathJax-centric user is an entirely different use case from a non-MathJax-centric user.

As discussed in E.P.’s answer and in my comments there, it would be a joke to suggest that the MathJax-centric user compose their post in rich text mode. However, as currently envisaged, the MathJax-centric user would still be dependent on rich text mode, using it as a poor man’s MathJax previewer. In other words, in order to incorporate the MathJax-centric use case, the rich text editor would also be moonlighting as a MathJax previewer. This is a terrible idea because

Fundamentally, MathJax is not compatible with a rich text representation.

MathJax is designed to be written in a Markdown-like environment and compiled into a separate final output. So a MathJax previewer is a completely different sort of thing from a rich text editor. Trying to make a rich text editor which is also a MathJax previewer is just asking for trouble -- especially when the MathJax business is an afterthought anyway. As discussed in my comments to E.P.'s answer, many have tried to do this and failed. If you try to do this, I anticipate that you will eventually throw up your hands and stop fully supporting MathJax, and then we're back to the sort of rioting that I talked about in my comments above (which were initially written under the mistaken understanding that there would be no Markdown mode at all, but which would be equally applicable in a scenario like this). To be clear:

If MathJax were not fully supported, it is quite likely that MathOverflow would exercise its contractual option to leave the Stack Exchange network, and sites like Math Stack Exchange would be similarly unhappy.

Solution: For these reasons, the only solution I see is the following:

There needs to be a dedicated preview for Markdown mode which is not dependent on the rich text editor.

This dedicated preview needs to fully support MathJax. Similarly, it needs to support plugins used at other sites like chess, go, furigana and music notation. What MathJax and these plugins have in common is that it would be infeasible to create a rich text representation which fully supports them, especially if this rich text representation is also supposed to be functioning as a preview of the published output.

Here's the kicker: the requirements of the sort of preview needed for this solution are already met and exceeded by the current live preview. So such a preview is 100% feasible, and the only remaining question is whether Stack Exchange is willing to commit to supporting these communities by (re-)implementing the preview.

---

Here are some further thoughts:

As discussed here, I agree that the live preview which exists in the current, non-rich-text, editor is in some ways an upgrade over many LaTeX editors because of its constant and automatic refresh. I don't need the refresh to be so frequent, or to be automatic, but it's a nice thing.

If there's no live preview in Markdown mode, I would prefer to have some form of preview I can see by hitting a "compile" button like in a standard LaTeX editor, without switching to rich text mode, for several reasons:

1. In rich text editors I've seen which have MathJax or Latex, the MathJax does not render fully before publishing (for example it may fail to render user-defined macros). There are good reasons for this -- MathJax / LaTeX is not designed with the understanding that there will be a one-to-one correspondence between the characters you're writing and the characters that will be output, so it would be infeasible to create such a correspondence for the purposes of a rich text representation.

2. For this and other reasons, I don't trust that what I see in the rich text representation adequately reflects what I will see when I publish. This makes it hard to catch errors before publishing.

3. It's cumbersome to switch frequently between modes, which I would need to do for previewing purposes (I would be writing exclusively in Markdown mode, for reasons discussed in E.P.'s answer and my comments there, and previewing in rich text mode).

4. One reason it would be cumbersome is that I anticipate there would be a time lag when switching modes.

5. Another reason it would be cumbersome is that I also anticipate that it would feel like the whole interface was being redone when switching modes, which is a jarring effect when all I want is to preview what I wrote.

6. The rich text interface would likely be designed with the presumption that the user was composing their post entirely in rich text mode, (and learning how to use the interface from that perspective) but since I would be using rich text mode exclusively for previewing, mine would be a completely different use case from what was intended. I anticipate this would lead to a frustrating experience for MathJax-centric users using rich text mode exclusively for previewing, both in learning and using the interface this way.

7. In order to toggle between rich text and Markdown content when writing a post of any length, I have to scroll up to access the toggle button. This is cumbersome for my anticipated use case, where I need to frequently toggle between modes, writing in Markdown and previewing in rich text mode. For one thing, I lose my place in what I'm writing, and have to find it again after switching modes. It’s doubly annoying because when I scroll up to toggle, I need to be sure I’m engaging the browser scroll rather than the editor scroll.

Answer 13

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

1. Start in Markdown mode
2. Write any text
3. Hit the Enter button

I expect the editor to take my cursor to the next line, but it doesn't. I need to hit Enter another time for the cursor to move, but when I restart typing words, they appear on the third line. In other words, the Enter button works, it's just the cursor that's lagging.

Reproducible in Firefox 86, but not in Chrome 88.

Answer 14

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

Quoting a multi-paragraph text messes up the paragraph segmentation.

E.g.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam commodo turpis sapien, sit amet auctor felis vehicula at. Integer commodo vitae diam eget tristique. Vivamus au

Aliquam lobortis diam a dictum suscipit. Aliquam in lacus eu mi suscipit posuere et ac dolor. Vestibulum aliquet, ex eget molestie placerat, dolor mauris cursus libero, eget luct.

becomes

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam commodo turpis sapien, sit amet auctor felis vehicula at. Integer commodo vitae diam eget tristique. Vivamus au> u> Aliquam lobortis diam a dictum suscipit. Aliquam in lacus eu mi suscipit posuere et ac dolor. Vestibulum aliquet, ex eget molestie placerat, dolor mauris cursus libero, eget luct.t.

Answer 15

bug status-completed

Bug reported opened on GH

A triple-click selects the entire text in Markdown mode

It's a standard practice in modern text fields to double-click in order to select a single word and triple-click to select a single paragraph. This has worked in the old editor, works in the Rich Text editor, but does not work in Markdown mode and the entire text gets selected instead.

Answer 16

feature-request status-completed

Can we have a symbol that resembles more of a table, then a calculator?

To me the large field in the top reminds me of a calculators display, with the buttons below it. I don’t recall ever using tables in which I merged columns in the title row.

Answer 17

feature-request bug

Feature request opened on GH

The image and link tools will now add images and links inline rather than in the bibliography format. While the latter will still work, you’ll have to create it manually.

First off: This doesn't quite work yet.

If you're going to allow manually adding a bibiliography format, please don't have switching editor modes mess with it (unless we're getting a different way to see a preview than the Rich Text editor :D)

---

Secondly, defaulting to inline links and images in Markdown breaks my workflow. I used the 'link' button a lot on longer posts with lots of links to research articles, as it would start a bibliography. The bibliography format made it easier to provide attribution, especially if I was reusing/quoting the same posts or articles multiple times in the same post. I could just type [text][number of link to reuse] and be done with it. While the syntax for inline links is easy to remember, it doesn't allow for this kind of reuse.

Another great benefit from the bibliography format in the 'old' editor, is that it adds images like this: [![enter image description here][1]][1]. It makes it much easier to hyperlink your image to another site, like this faq explains. Just change the second number, and put another entry in the bibliography list at the bottom of the post. The current editor inserts images using the ![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/RRHYf.jpg) format, which gets messy quickly if you want to insert an extra hyperlink... it takes a lot more to memorize how to do that.

And, in long posts with lots of links, having them at the bottom of the post makes the work of potential editors a bit nicer, especially if the links used are long.

I'm not sure why this decision was made, but in my opinion it makes posts messier, not neater. I don't see many support questions on meta from people that are struggling with the bibliography format, so I don't think it's about 'ease of use'. And while the Rich Text editor is there for people that do struggle a bit with writing Markdown, that editor doesn't care how the links are written in Markdown, so those people will never have to know.

As such I'd like to ask you to reconsider defaulting to the inline links, for both links and images.

Answer 18

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

The rich text editor does not escape HTML, but displays it in the preview as though it was escaped.

For instance, if I create a post with these contents:

To create a link, use <a href=”https://stackoverflow.com”>text here</a>

It is <this and > that

It will display as:

To create a link, use text here

It is that

Worse yet, converting back and forth corrupts it. Note that it starts with escaped HTML entities, then goes to unescaped HTML, then removes chunks of the (invalid due to smart quotes) HTML. It also breaks the quote formatting.

(I was unable to create this post in the new editor due to these bugs)

Answer 19

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

If you start writing in Rich Text mode and click the ‘Horizontal rule’ button, it’s automatically selected and you can’t deselect it, not even by clicking outside the answer box. Therefore, as soon as you start typing, the horizontal rule disappears.

Answer 20

feature-request images status-completed

Make inserted images clickable (like in the former editor).

The new editor uses ![](https://i.sstatic.net/HvbcS.png), the former uses:

[![enter image description here][1]][1]

  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/HvbcS.png

Making inserted images clickable is useful for large images.

Answer 21

feature-request status-planned

Feature request opened on GH

Add the ability to easily change the language of a code block.

This was mentioned in another answer I believe, but I would like to add some mock UX for an idea of how it can work and look.

I just added an arrow next to the language to make it look like a selector.

When clicking on the language, a dialogue would appear with possible selection. For example, a list similar to the following.

✓ auto
-------
c#
css
html
javascript
plaintext
python

---

Another idea would be to show a dialogue similar to the image's details dialogue. Although this can be annoying and would much prefer the option above.

Answer 22

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

In Markdown mode, the syntax highlighting doesn't know about *escaped asterisks* - it'll still show the words in between (including the trailing backslash) in italics.

Answer 23

bug status-planned

Bug report opened on GH

In Rich mode, spoilers don’t have the “Reveal Spoiler” text:

Answer 24

bug status-review

1. Type some text

2. Paste something

3. Press Ctrl/Cmd+z

4. Watch your typed text being undone, and not your pasted "plaintext"

Answer 25

bug status-completed

Discarding a draft doesn’t clear the editor in both modes

1. Start typing an answer.

2. Wait until the draft is saved and the Discard button appears.

3. Click Discard.

4. It says “Draft discarded” as usual but the text stays in the editor.

5. When trying to leave the page, a warning message about “losing changes” is displayed.

Answer 26

bug status-review

Bug report opened on GH

If I want to add some fancy keyboard buttons using <kbd>X</kbd>

X

They show up perfectly in the rich formatting, but when putting your cursor behind the X will make you type inside the kbd element. There is no way to type anything on that same line. Not even forcing your your cursor to appear there by double clicking (as would work in MS Word).

Reproduction steps:

• Start in markdown mode

• Add the following text:

  <kbd>X</kbd>
  

• Switch to rich text mode

• Placing the cursor inside the kbd element allows you to edit it, but your cursor is trapped and cannot leave the element

Answer 27

bug status-completed

Bug report opened on GH

Table cells misalign if you add URLs to a cell

I attempted to create this table with URLs in the first column:

Adding the URLs to the text causes the table formatting to break. Cells become misaligned. This happens when you are creating/editing the table via rich text and when you are using markdown.

Steps to repro: Create table, add URL to text either via markdown or using the "insert link" icon

Column A	Column B
Cell 1	Cell 2
Cell 3	Cell 4

Was able to do this successfully in MSE editor, had misalignment issue in Teams editor

Answer 28

bug status-review

While adding an answer, if I copy text in markdown mode and paste it in rich text editor mode, the text gets pasted as code block. I would rather the text gets copied to the clipboard unformatted while in markdown mode.

I'm using Firefox, but unsure if this is reproducible elsewhere.

---

Ctrl/Cmd + C the following selection

Ctrl/Cmd + V in the rich text editor mode

Answer 29

bug / feature-request status-review

_{I'm not sure if this classifies as a bug but it’s something that has always worked and doesn’t work with the new editor.}

So, I’m using a spell/grammar checker Chrome extension which works with most text fields. It works with the old editor, with the new Rich Text editor but for some reason, it does not work when switching to markdown:

Now, that’s a shame because this extension has been really helpful in writing (and especially, editing) posts, which a lot of it will be done in the Markdown mode.

Is it possible to fix this issue or should I wait until the new editor goes live and then take this “bug report” to Grammarly?

Update:

Checking the element in Chrome’s developer tools shows that the markdown text is wrapped in a <code> tag and that’s likely the cause:

<pre class="s-code-block markdown">
    <code>test</code>
</pre>

Answer 30

feature-requestmobile-chrome status-norepro

Feature request opened on GH

If I want to start a post off with a bolded statement (usually a TL;DR), on mobile I can't see what I'm doing if I use the Rich Text editor, as the 'Bold' label doesn't disappear until I tap the white pop-up:

It would be nice if these things a.) weren't put in a place where they block part of the editor or b.) automatically disappeared (perhaps a short time-out?), so that I can start typing without having to manually dismiss them.