Confluence, Notion, Wiki, Jira... what’s common about them?
They’re slow. And often times, clumsy –
in the sense that often times they don’t do what you indended to.
In this post, I want to focus on writing.
Stories, Epics, Specifications, Documentation.
These tools don’t adhere to a common standard. They all have
some kind of WISYWIG editors.
But in my opinion, most of this feature bloat isn’t needed, and even unasked
for.
Instead of writing a coherent text with the most basic formatting possible, people overuse tables’,
dropdowns’ and formatting.
Often times it breaks. I dread editing a table in Jira or Confluence. One
awkward movement and everything is broken.
What’s worse is that these tools can “eat” the thing that you’re
editing and sent it to the void, and unless you copied it or saved it somewhere else, it can be forever lost. It
happened to me at least a dozen of times. Ctrl+Z doesn’t work in these cases.
I wish version control
in these tools would show raw diffs, instead of trying to show something in between.
Information gets lost not only due to unaccaptable software mishaps, it also gets lost due to possibility
of unlimited nesting, broken links. Even more than that: I personally lack the motivation to use this software,
because of the aforementioned reasons.
I wish that Markdown ruled the world of non-programmers too.
I
believe we can have the best of both worlds:
People can even have formatting buttons, and they can even see
the preview without dealing with raw formatting.
But I would much rather write in raw .md, without crazy
heavy WISYWIG solutions.
Btw, is there anything like Notion but .md ?