New editor in Trello card descriptions and comments

[#1]

Hi Trello Admins,

My name is Caity Cogdell, and I’m a Product Manager on the Trello Team. Today, I’m excited to share that Trello’s new editing toolbar is now available to all Trello Enterprise customers! The new editor allows users to easily format text and insert images in the card description or comments, all without having to learn Markdown.

In addition to using the new toolbar, your organization’s users can still type Markdown in the new editor, and it will automatically be converted to formatted text. If they don't want the text to be formatted, they can press command + z or control + z to undo the formatting. Users can also go back to the previous experience for now by going to trello.com/labs and switching off “WYSIWYG Editing”.

The new editor is available in both the Trello web and desktop apps—stay tuned for an announcement for mobile in the future!

Learn more about the new editor here.

[Gabriel Takang]

This is great. Thanks

[Nesta]

Awesome, thank you!

[Taco Joe]

> Users can also go back to the previous experience for now by going to trello.com/labs and switching off “WYSIWYG Editing”.

Please please please don't deprecate the markdown editor as an option. WYSIWYG editors rarely work all that well or intuitively, especially for users who know markdown. It's fine as the default experience, and of course this will serve the largest number of users well, but there's a substantial subset of Trello's userbase who are in tech, and will find a forced change like this to be extremely frustrating.

Edit: If anything, it would be an improvement to move to a more full-featured version of markdown, since there are quite a few functionalities completely missing from the current version. It's even more restricted with the WYSIWYG editor, even when copy-pasting markdown from a local text editor into the Trello one.

[Mary Agueros]

Thank you Caity for the concise information regarding the editor enhancements 

[Kamil Cholewiński]

My experience so far with the new WYSIWYG editor has been extremely frustrating. I've been a Trello user for over a decade and I'm seriously considering alternatives.

It's not just that I'm used to editing Markdown; the new editor tries to be helpful by guessing how and what I want to edit or format, and the guess is often wrong. I paste a URL, and I don't get to edit it; it gets automatically converted to an unfurled link. I need to take my hands off the keyboard, and click the "edit link" option to take me to a form with separate URL/title fields. When editing a list, pressing enter auto-inserts the next item. If I already started typing some text on that item, I cannot press "backspace" to turn it into a paragraph, because it joins it with the previous item. Starting a new paragraph requires a single "enter", not two: I end up using *more* rather than *less* keystrokes because of that, because all new paragraphs end up being started with "enter-enter-backspace".

All of these things are wired into my muscle memory from editing Markdown; the new editor tries to capitalize on that muscle memory by recognizing some Markdown shortcuts, but ends up in an uncanny valley of being nowhere in between. There are just so many little annoyances that turn editing simple card descriptions into a frustrating chore. It's death by a thousand papercuts.

Turning off the WYSIWYG editor in the Trello labs does not work for the Electron or mobile apps, only for the web. The "plaintext" Markdown editor on the web no longer works correctly either; I cannot make a heading, because it inserts a literal "\#" into the underlying Markdown source. I am no longer actually editing Markdown, but some dialect that again - puts me somewhere nowhere in between.

Dear Atlassian, I love and have loved Trello for over a decade. You're making one of my all-time simple and favorite tools into one of the most frustrating to use. Please don't ruin something that was already perfect.