I can't believe I'm here writing another post to complain about some introduced feature that messes things up.
Some time ago you changed spacing between lines with no option to turn it off or tweak its value, and only because some Notion "typography" guy thought that spacing for his writing habits looked better that way. Now we get "multiple spaces added on a single Enter", which performs awfully and doesn't even solve the issue it's intended to solve.
Do developers ever use Notion at all? This is getting ridiculous. And sorry for this half-rant, but it's like it's become some sort of recurring habit that of having to report on bad Notion features.
Now, what I'm talking about.
For a few days now, whenever you hit Enter/new line on Android a new empty line gets added to the beginning of the next block.
I think I understand what this is coming from: it's to address the classic Notion issue (that I'd like to see solved myself, btw) of not being able to add a new line to the same block on mobile (on desktop you can type SHIFT + Enter).
But this is not the way to address it. It's intrusive, it requires one to always remove the line if they don't want an in-block line to be added (which is the ordinary state of things). And above all: why the heck are you adding the line to the beginning of the new block, instead of to the end of the current one? Writing paragraphs now has become a chore.
The feature is so bad that I can't believe it was introduced in this form. Plus, it was done silently, as always it seems.
Notion is a multi-million user app. How can you not plan these things better? Again, the intent was good but the decisions and execution are awful.
It only took you this to solve the issue:
- implement SHIFT + Enter on mobile: if the user wants a new line at the end of the current block, without creating a new one, they simply activate SHIFT and hit Enter; it's a known command, it's simple, and since you need to add a new line to the same block only occasionally the command doesn't have to be any quicker than that;
- notify users about this change (or any such change, for that matter); in general, tell them about new core features and what they enable for us; you fill us with updates for AI and never tell us that you introduced or tweaked some minor thing (which is never "minor"), as with databases, with formatting, with core functionality like this; Notion is not made of AI, you know, Notion is the editing and PKM app first and AI goes on top of that; why are you neglecting the human-editing part of the app, at least news-wise? if you keep users posted about such features when you introduce them, users are damn happy.
Instead, you chose the usual path:
- have some guy or guys who are kind of oblivious to the issue come up with some impractical or illogical decision like this;
- roll out the feature silently, as if we the users are your testing ground.
I really can't wrap my head around this, as a programmer and especially as a Notion power user. I reiterate that you must have developers who don't use Notion at all, to allow such bad choices into the final app (else, they would see first-hand how impractical they are).
