I apologize if this is more of a response to the headline than the article content, but how does Slack, a professionally-oriented messaging app, not have syntax highlighting features for their markdown while Discord— a casual, gamer-oriented messaging app– does?
I have, and I generally prefer it to Slack, unlike Slack, it (off the top of my head):
- Has much richer message formatting and doesn't regularly do weird things to mess up the formatting as I'm composing a message. (Just this morning I was fighting Slack to try have nested bullet points not disappearing or de-indenting as I was composing a message).
- Consistently marks messages as read without me having to click chats multiple times for the unread indicator to disappear. With Slack I somewhat regularly have this problem, more than once a week.
- Like every other application on Windows, Ctrl+K works for adding a hyperlink. Slack is in fact so aware that people are used to using the Ctrl+K shortcut it even catches you trying to do it and then tells you how to add hyperlinks in their own special snowflake way.
- Doesn't clutter my Windows notification centre. Unless I clicked the notification center message it doesn't ever disappear. WhatsApp by comparison which also uses the Windows notification center does this perfectly. Slack is the same on iOS, it doesn't clear messages from the notification center once a message is read unless you clicked the notification.
Teams has its warts for sure, but I find it's considerably more polished than Slack in general.
It's not perfect, but I'm very productive and happy using it.
Windows 11 Pro on my Dell Latitude 5540 and it's a rock solid experience.
I on principle always format my disk drive when getting a new PC and reinstall using an ISO downloaded from Microsoft to ensure no OEM software is on them. For my Dell the only thing I install is "Dell Command | Update" (not to be confused with Dell SupportAssist which is crap targeting general consumers). It's for updating drivers and firmware and it does absolutely no nonsense, only prompting me when a driver or firmware update is available.
I use no third-party anti-malware, no "corporate management software", just Windows Defender, but with Dev Drive and exclusions to my working directories so everything is very fast for my development work with Visual Studio.
My work is mostly developing for .NET and Electron which works on Linux and macOS as well. WSL with Visual Studio is super impressive that I can seamlessly debug processes running under WSL from normal Visual Studio. For Electron / NodeJS debugging I can use VS Code which also supports debugging processes running under WSL.
I have done two registry tweaks to Windows 11 to remove a couple of annoyances:
- I've turned off the "simplified" context menu which shows by default in Windows Explorer, otherwise most of what I need is hidden behind an extra click of my mouse.
- I've turned off internet search results from showing on the Start Menu. This is a huge quality of life improvement, I've never ever cared for searching outside of my web browser and it makes the Start Menu super responsive and stops it showing web results above stuff on my local computer which was what I was looking for.
(As a side remark, I was very happy when I only somewhat recently worked out how to get iOS to stop showing web search results when I search my home screen for apps, that was a huge annoyance as I only want to search for apps on my phone by name and often it would show web searches over a locally installed app name.)
People constantly complain here about all the adverts on Windows 11. I honestly don't get any adverts, maybe it's because I'm in South Africa and not the US (marketing sounds like it's beyond obnoxious there). I think it came pre-installed (even when installing with the ISO downloaded from MS) with a few rubbish Windows Store apps (like Candy Crush), but I uninstalled them normally and nothing ever came back. I also use OneDrive already (which integrates really nicely with Windows), maybe if I didn't have it set up, Windows would be bugging me about it.
Install NetLimiter and be amazed with the MB/s of data that is getting uploaded into Microsoft when your PC is at rest, even when you open PowerPoint and are just editing a slide..
Install SystemInformer (the successor of ProcessHacker) and be amazed how Microsoft Telemetry will use 12 to 15% of your CPU even with the machine at rest...
- Multiple Visual Studio instances (with ReSharper)
- Several Electron(-like) based Applications
- Outlook Classic
- Slack
- Teams
- Docker Desktop
As is plain from the screenshot, there is not MB/s of network traffic, furthermore, the CPU is also pretty idle as one would expect from my not doing anything heavy (like compilation) at this moment. This is very typical for my PC most of the time.
Based on my decades of using Windows full time and my screenshot, your comment is absolutely not representative of typical idle resource usage.
I do however acknowledge that there is a recurring scheduled telemetry collection process which when it runs pegs an entire CPU Core for minutes. I do find this annoying when I notice it, but that's maybe every couple of months which isn't enough of an annoyance to me to waste my time worrying about it, or I might have actually already disabled it in Task Scheduler.
Some people on principle dislike telemetry which is a completely understandable viewpoint, but for me personally I'm okay with Microsoft collecting essentially anonymous usage statistics to better understand how people use their software and where best to direct their efforts.
No experience with slack but channels in teams are pretty terrible.
Notifications off by default so people create new channels with you as a member, write extremely important information inside them and you find out weeks later.
Each post is like an announcement so nobody uses them for the everyday trivial stuff you need a channel for. For casual technical discussion, asking for help. Whenever you post in a channel, assuming people enabled notifications and your post will be actually seen, everyone is compelled to answer as the UI screams for attention.
And don't get me started about it hiding part of a post by default so you answer thinking you read everything but you missed an essential part because post was 4 rows and 2 were hidden.
I really don't get the hate for Teams. At least on Windows and Android it works well enough. One thing I find impressive is since I can't join my earbuds to my company PC I join a meeting on the PC and my phone so I can use my earbuds and microphone while watching video on my PC screen.
An app so broken that can tell you lost access to the Chat... WHILE...you are in a meeting hearing and seeing a visual presentation...Open bug for at least 6 years...
Unable to pause screen during a presentation, one of the most basic features of a professional platform. A feature requested here by more than 2460 users, for at least the last five years:
No, we are talking about pausing or providing a smooth transition to another page. Essential features of a professional presentation. Features present for ever and ever in GotoMeeting, Zoom and Webex...
The update last year where replies in threads ping you (make the icon red etc) same as if you got a mention/DM is just insane. Makes you accidentally ignore more crucial dms because non important threads get updated.
I wish Slack had a "don't mute this channel completely, but only show it as unread once a day".
We use Twist at my company. I find the emphasis on asynchronous communication refreshing. It encourages more thoughtful discussion. Basecamp also lends helpfully in this direction, although adopting Basecamp means accepting an entire project management system as well.
- Tech debt, they can't easily add or change features anymore
- Performance, rendering syntax highlighted markdown in messages is too expensive
- Performance optimization, by not having syntax highlighting they encourage people to create snippets instead, which goes to different backends and lazily loaded clientside rendering pipelines to support larger files and syntax highlighting.
> Tech debt, they can't easily add or change features anymore
It's this. I've worked on Slack applications and you can clearly see why they might struggle to implement this given the data structure of their messages. Their brand of markup is also quirky and it might be difficult to add this feature in a backwards compatible way
Snippets was added much later and part of me feels like the demand for syntax highlighting was exactly why they added snippets. It's also a scapegoat for them not adding syntax highlighting to regular messaging
So I have to upload files to enable syntax highlighting. There is probably a reason but the users frustration is helping them to look for alternatives.
In Slack you get syntax highlighting if you use /snippet instead of Markdown fences, but everything else supports Markdown fences, so it seems dumb Slack doesn't and you have to discover a random slash command to do it. Similarly it bugs me that Slack's Markdown uses a different definition of italics and bold than CommonMark and most everyone else. I know the biggest standard of Markdown is that there is no real standard, but Slack's Markdown sure is less standard than normal.
Also how does Slack still have an error where trying to move the cursor in/out of syntax highlighting can "trap" you so you no longer see the message that will actually get submitted.
You can desync the WYSWIG nature of it to the point where you submit text that was "invisible" to you while also potentially deleting text in the submission that you can still see.
A more simple to reproduce bug is that you can't edit before the first character of a syntax block. The cursor skips from outside the syntax block to after the first character inside the block.
It sorta supports syntax highlighting with text snippets (cmd-shift-return iirc), just not in regular backticks like Discord. It's not great, though. Copying directly from Slack rather than downloading may give you invisible characters in the data
ironically enough you can see from the screenshot of their "internal webhook" that they're using discord to log when a new support thread on slack is created!
Yeah, Discord for coding related things is far superior than anything else I've tried in the space (Slack, Teams, Skype, Mattermost, etc).
I've not actually used it in a professional setting but there are a large number of very active/thriving coding related communities (mostly open source, but not exclusively) and Discord seems to handle them well.
