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Unaiyesterday at 11:48 PM1 replyview on HN

If you're gonna go off-topic, I wanna join.

How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.

We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.


Replies

conductrtoday at 7:03 AM

I’ll pile on this one. I’ve never quite figured out some of the common formatting icons they use. Text color and text background fill color I guess wrong every single time and think “why is that icon used for that”. I can never find how to edit bullet types. Simple stuff that I never struggle to locate and identify in any other application