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Forum Discussion
General comments about Markdown.
I may be a little late to the party and so far haven't tried to use it. I, of course, don't know all the history and logic behind where it's at, but here goes.
Having an editor that can handle for...
1P_Ben
1Password Team
1Password TeamHi DoctorBrown
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I'd be happy to share mine. 😃
Why do you continue to introduce major features piecemeal across all the devices you support? No doubt it's a resource constraint. I could be wrong but this will inevitability lead to slow adoption and frustration because of the issues moving the data among the devices. I've already read several posts describing just this issue. I would hold off releasing it until it's completed for the majority of the devices.
We're working toward significantly narrowing these gaps. With 1Password 8, we moved to an entirely different model for development. Instead of separate teams being responsible for each platform we support, each working on their own schedule and codebase, we've moved to feature/function area-based teams with a unified core codebase. One of our founders, Dave, wrote more about this approach here:
Behind the scenes of 1Password for Linux | by Dave Teare | Medium
As a result of these efforts, the parity between our desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux, along with our mobile apps on iOS and Android, should be pretty darn good. But there are a couple of big pieces that are outstanding. Our https://my.1Password.com web app has yet to use the core. Our browser extensions utilize it, but not to the degree our desktop and mobile apps do. We plan to narrow those gaps in the future, but they are large time-intensive projects.
Long story short: we're aware of it and have taken concrete steps to minimize it. We continue to work on further improvements in that regard.
Why, in this day and age, do we have to live with embedding actual formatting syntax into a document? And another format syntax to learn! At least from a Windows (primarily), Android (limited editing), and Apple (limited editing) user. I surmise that there are plenty of editing apps that are WYSIWYG that can accomplish all that with a formatting tool bar and such.
We chose markdown because that accounted for the substantial volume of customer requests. E.g.:
Feature Request: Markdown for Secure Notes
We built what folks were asking for. 😄 It helped that we were already using markdown extensively, and it is inherently human readable even when not rendered, whereas RTF is not. Also, RTF is proprietary, whereas markdown is an open standard.
Why not license one (if needed) and integrate it into your apps? Why not use a more standard rtf editor?
A WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor could be built on top of the existing system. That is something we'd consider. I'll be happy to record your request for that with our Product team. 👐
Ben
ref: PB-34127298
Ben
Some sort of WYSIWYG editor/plug-in/widget is still lacking! This issue was first raised at least three years ago, and we've seen no progress.
Just consider the workflow if you are trying to put a small table of info into your secure note. At present, the only option to create something that looks like a table is to use preformatted text of some sort. But, the default font for displaying note text while editing is a variable-width font. So, in editing mode, because there is no WYSIWYG support, you are forced to add/edit raw markdown text, then hit "Save" to see what you got, then try to remember by visual scanning how many spaces you were off on any given row/column, then hit "Edit" again to go tweak the spacing, then hit "Save" to see if you got it right, then hit "Edit" again to address spacing problems on another line or two, then..... etc, etc, etc, etc,..... until you are done. The back and forth is tedious and deeply frustrating. Even for a fairly small table of 3 columns with less than 10 rows, it can take dozens of iterations to get the formatting right! The only other option you have is to create the pre-formatted text in some other editor, and then paste it into 1password. But that's not always a reasonable option-- consider the case where you are on a mobile device, and do not have access to another device to do the editing you need to do!
I chose to use the task of entering a small table as an example because it seems like the perfect storm, and it's a fairly common task. But it's true for most any markdown you use -- for example, if you are trying to bold something and you accidentally hit the wrong number of "*" characters on one side or the other, you can't see the mistake you made until you hit "Save". Then you have to remember where the mistake is, hit "Edit", correct the mistake, and hit "Save" again to be sure you got it right.
This community forum obviously supports some form of basic markdown, and has a basic formatting toolbar to assist -- and displays formatted text as you enter it. The 1Password app (on all platforms!) should support something similar, even if it's stripped down a bit.
Do you use Jira internally? Tools like that have a way to switch back and forth between "Text" mode, where you view/edit raw markdown text, and a "Visual" mode where you can view/edit the formatted text. That'd be an okay way to do it-- even if the "Visual" mode was just a "Preview".
Supporting cutting/pasting of formatted texts between applications (on the desktop applications, anyway) would also be welcome-- but let's walk before we run. It's pointless to consider formatted cut/paste if you can't even SEE formatted text while you are editing it in 1Password.
PLEASE, for the love of all your users, add this to your development docket and give it a few hundred +1s on behalf of all the users that have been frustrated by this for 3+ years!
- 1P_Dave
Moderator
Thank you for the passionate feedback! I've passed your feature request along to our product team for consideration.
We're currently testing a WYSIWYG editor for the Snippets feature that we're testing in Labs (on the Mac) and it's possible that similar functionality could be introduced for Secure Notes in the future:
-Dave
PB-50792993
