Editor (and overall software) quality – some priority here, please?

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1

I am really, really having trouble understanding why there are so many editor bugs in Anytype. Literally every single time I write more than one sentence I stumble over this bug. Now I realized that copy-paste does very weird things. Then there are at least some fundamental issues with grid sorting, and I probably forget a couple of other things.

Those are not “little bugs”, those are fundamental properties which everyone (at least: I) expect to work correctly if present, because they are so incredibly basic (I mean, really, number sorting of a grid?!)

Now, looking through the forums and the infamous roadmap, I see this:

  • API and Integrations
  • Chats
  • Chat Notifications
  • Global and Space-level Profiles
  • New Membership
  • Referral Program
  • Simplify the process of inviting Members

And the backlog does not look much better.

Leaving the “get new members” items aside (money is important, after all) – there is not a single mentioning about those baseline issues, and honestly, I start doubting it. This feels simply super super sloppy, sorry. If I stumble on literally every single interaction about one of those things, I ask myself whether Any folks are not using Anytype themselves, or whether they are really that phlegmatic – sorry if that hurts some feelings, unfortunately this is literally how I feel about this. I simply cannot process the non-fixing of this stuff.

But even if Any doesn’t care (?) about that – I certainly do, and maybe some others as well. So:

Could we please have some focus on general function quality / bug fixing?

That would be just so nice. :confused:

3

The most annoying bug for me it’s the fact that after writing on any page on mobile then when I scroll to the top and to the bottom the cursor goes back into writing mode and if I was scrolling I get to swipe on the keyboard and some word might me replaced without me understanding where (have to hop in the edit history)

Btw we are still under the 1.0 and they are clearly not focusing on burning funds hiring more devs… I think we kinda have to just embrace it for now lol

4

and imo QA gets worse with each version. the more they change the less groundwork they seem to do. I have to admit that I just watch now from afar for quite a while now because of all this. the roadmap doesn’t give me hope that this will improve. the UX gets worse and worse the more while they just add new concepts on top. bugs that exist for over 2 years don’t get even addressed
it feels like they don’t have any UI/UX designers anymore and they implement on the fly.

5

Oh don’t get me started on mobile. Recentily I wanted to update sth, and while I could make the edit I wanted to, – I remember finally reverting to my notebook for all followup work because I couldn’t get the app to work at all on iOS. (I don’t remember what exactly it was that was so foobared, but I remember I tried for about 20 mins, and that it was broken beyond the usable).

6

Our plan actually after the next big release in June to spent whole summer on fixing bugs as whole team. Roadmap is hi level and it doesn’t seem feasible to put there bugs. You can see we fix them every day and we just need to focus as whole team to make a leap in it.

7

That is really great to hear! Maybe share such plans a bit more often?

Not the word I would use to describe that thing … :grimacing: . Also, if the whole team spends the whole summer, that surely is a high-level effort in my book and would belong in there.

8

If I may make two suggestions, which in my view are the two most important points:

  1. Make the whole think faster! (“Make Anytype great again” ;-))
    – Since some weeks (since the new concept how Types and Templates work) everything has become so unbearable slooooowww that all the fun to use Anytype has gone. :frowning:
    In fact, I already procrastinate to add new data into my Spaces, because it is too unbearable slow.
    Yeah, in fact, I not even report each and every bug anymore, because it costs me to much time to make tests for reproducing issues if everything is as slow as a snail.
    .
    It seems to me that this has more then only one reason. And the team should work on every front to solve every problem that burns time and forces the user to wait.
    – Really, it can’t be that the user needs to wait 1-2 seconds after each single key stroke for some operations, like editing an Object’s name - it sometimes even happen inside normal text Blocks.
    You can’t work this way!

  2. It’s not a bug, but a painful missed basic feature:
    Give images backlinks!
    – I have Queries full of images, fine. But I really need to know to which Objects they belong!
    .
    Also if this is not a bug - this missing feature is so basic, that it is “as good as” a bug.
    It is like bread & butter - and we miss it.
    Don’t do any pastry work on an ornate cake as long as we suffer from a lack of basic foodstuffs.

To program a chat and AI stuff etc. may be more fun for the programmers, and of course the crowd will cheer about things like that.
But for the daily work the basics must run without frictions!
Otherwise, frustration gains the upper hand.

10

Sadly I agree. The editor feels wonky and needs some refinement.

11

Agree.
But I don’t know if it’s easy to modify, or if it requires a real study/project.

On the other hand, I strongly recommend incorporating any small improvements/corrections that can be made quickly!
It’ll clear up the number of queries and correct a lot of little flaws.
And if you’re going to avoid new features this summer and concentrate on the bugs, you might as well add the little things that can be squeezed in between two bugs… especially as they’ll be seen and the community will be pleased (otherwise, it’ll be a dead period for those who don’t have any bugs… the lucky ones).

For example, requests to correct headings (such as “Delete” which doesn’t delete), to add visual information (info on shared spaces, on published objects, update date, etc.), on editing (small bugs or UX improvements).
All these little things that are requested, that take up little time and yet go unanswered…

(oh and why not take the opportunity to make a pass on all the forum requests, it would be nice to have a bit of com…)

12

I haven’t observed any slowdown at my end. Maybe there is something specific about your space? The size maybe, or intense use of particular object types that are slow. (I’m doing wild guesses here, as I don’t know anything about Anytype’s internals.)

13

Then you’re very lucky (for whatever reason).
I’m not the only one who suffers from the unacceptable snail speed:

Every tiny action in Anytype, that needs maybe five mouse clicks, sums up to minute or so.
To “work” this way is nothing else then frust! And we have the situation since 10 weeks or so! :frowning:

14

tried to delete the cache of anytype already?

15

I didn’t want to make this a separate topic, but I wanted to express my current feeling somewhere, so I’m putting it here

Two “fun fact” :

  • we were explicitly asked to test and give feedback on something (widgets). Like others, I did my utmost, reporting bugs, suggestions and a few questions.
    No feedback (yes, just like our suggestions in the forum despite the explicit request). And my feedback was deleted. In short, time wasted for me for this, it pisses me off (not being an English speaker, the term may be too strong or too weak, sorry, just see it as a strong feeling without aggression).
    edit : it was a mistake as I was told (thank you) but it still leaves you wondering.

  • I wanted to “sell” Anytype to my family this weekend and after several mix-ups and “ah no, that doesn’t work” (especially since the person wanted to use the Android version, poor thing ;-))… I suggested waiting until 2026 (and we installed a competing app).

I also admit that I don’t often enjoy working with the tool, as there are major flaws in the UI (and what’s more, I have to explain it over and over to new users or on bug reports ^^). If I have the courage (and the hope that it will be useful), I’ll post the latest inconsistencies ;-).

So even if I’m positive… I’ll let you guess my state of mind.
And I’ve just read an article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “theory of stupidity”. I can’t ignore these doubts so I wanted to at least share them a little, thanks for reading :sweat_smile:.

PS: this is just my feeling, closely related to my expectations. Many will be happy with Anytype… and I still hope to be too one day. It’s just harder some days :wink:

16

I feel the same. Anytype over the years just added more and more features, trying to expand, while leaving unfinished, unpolished, buggy and complex concepts. I believe you could spend a good month just polishing the text editor. As the whole thing is about typing, the editor needs so many improvements. Next, I would say is the filtering, sorting and displaying in both collections and queries.

I don’t want to sound mean or disrespectful but you need to understand that even my girlfriend that loves stuff like this, looked into my space and after 2 minutes trying to show her how to filter in querry and trying to add a new object by selecting a template, she just resigned saying it is too complicated and chaotic. Next time wanted her to add a note on my phone. To my surprise, queries and collections are not fully implemented, so she just made an empty page object instead of the pre-set one. Got confused and closed the app. I believe experiences like this just force people off and I hope this new aim you took will provide good improvements.

17

This may not matter anything, but (and I do believe it was a mistake) .. I am constantly impressed with your tireless work on Anytype (forum and the ocasional code/patches)!

This may be the key! The expectations!
For what I expect Anytype to do, it does it great! I know I cannot even ask Anytype to do 5% of what my Emacs OrgMode does, but there is also things Anytype does that Emacs does not do, or as nicelly! (a few but they exist). But then again, I am nearing 3000 lines in LISP config code on Emacs. With API and plugins further down the road, maybe I can dream on Anytype.

My expectation is simple: Notes, Diary/Journal, Tasks/Projects/Calendar (with the new timeline with be awesome), Media center. No CRM, no “cust omer” service, no excel, no whatever. That is it, and does it very well!
It does need some custom.css fixes, and I always need to add properties and types.

The Editor is no match for Emacs and Neovim, but I never expect any software to beat those (and none still hasn’t). Its no better or worse than other editors, so again, expectation matched! (better than most I have tried, with maybe Obsidian being the exception).

18

It’s really important to me, thank you! I sometimes get messages following my replies in Help or elsewhere that are really very pleasing, and justify spending time doing this.

I stayed because the widgets promised a lot and tags as objects were in sight.
I’m not hoping to replace Notion, which would be great, but they’ve got a big head start (both in terms of functions and UI :wink:). I just need to replace Evernote, which I think is well within the reach of Anytype once…
And that’s my fear. Spending so much time helping out where I can, if I never manage to use it, makes me sorry.
Right now, it’s lost to get my family over it, too many flaws and when you present the application it forces you to step back and answer questions ;-).
Likewise, to answer a bug, I’ve discovered that Query doesn’t work the same way for x number of obscure reasons. Nothing indicates it, nothing seems to justify it and I only discovered it by chance. I got tired of it, I didn’t have the courage to make a post that would probably have been useless.
We come back to two problems already discussed at length:

  • a successful UX via a well-designed UI is essential: even if the tool is limited, if you enjoy using it, it’s half the battle. If you already love Anytype, a better UX would certainly be appreciated, wouldn’t it?
  • communication, so rare. So many remarks, even if the details are really easy to correct (but when it comes to design, I wouldn’t do it), and the subject will end up lost in limbo. What’s the point?
    Maybe it’ll come “later”. I hope so, I’m staying anyway, but I confess I’m asking myself some questions.
19

I feel you. Unfortunately, there’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said. We’ve received thousands of feature requests and bug reports, and honestly, sometimes it feels impossible to keep up. If only we were building in the cloud—just implementing basic push notifications took us months, something that could be done in a day with a proper cloud-based setup.

Our plan now is to spend the next three months focusing solely on fixing bugs and polishing the overall experience. If we make meaningful progress—great, we’ll keep going. If not, we’ll fully open-source it, give it as a gift to the community, and move on to launching a much simpler, far more stable version without all the legacy features and issues that are currently dragging us down.

One positive sign: surprisingly, a lot of people are still using it every day. Maybe it’s just an illusion and they’re suffering in silence (because praise is apparently forbidden), but still—it’s something.

We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for sticking with us.

UPD:

Some folks misunderstood my earlier post and came away thinking we’re planning to shut down Anytype. That’s not true—and I’m sorry for the confusion my wording caused.

What I meant to say is that we’re currently struggling under the weight of legacy infrastructure and unfinished features. For context, we only just recently shut down backend systems that were still supporting the 2019 version of Anytype (!). Maintaining backwards compatibility with multiple outdated versions takes at least 10x the effort compared to building cleanly from scratch.

We’re not talking about launching a brand-new product. The idea we floated internally was to potentially create a streamlined version of the current app—same core principles, just without the baggage. In practice, that could mean removing certain legacy features and making the migration path one-way. But let me be absolutely clear: this is just one option among many, and there are no current plans to go down that road.

For now, we’re committing the next three months to fixing bugs and improving the current experience. I’ll be posting soon to gather feedback on what matters most to the community—what must be fixed, what’s most frustrating—and we’ll focus all our effort there. After that, we’ll reevaluate.

Thanks again for your patience and support. We’re not abandoning this project. Quite the opposite—we’re trying to save it from collapsing under its own weight.

20

hm. but do you, in fact, react, or even understand?

because the complaints (also in this thread) are literally always the same:

  • communication “bad”
  • transparency “bad”
  • quality “bad”
  • road map “bad” (despite so far empty promises to “do better”, and the most “fun” example to me was a user’s (!!) vision being passed around as “that’s happening” – probably in pure desperation for lack of any other usable information)

and frustration levels are not “low” – just one example out of many here. if you’d actually improve things, you’d see those posts get fewer. I don’t think they do. and the development pace that seems unsuited for playing “catch up”.

personally, the only feature during the last six months I really really like is “date as an object”, and I strongly wonder if that pace and state of things is worth staying and waiting – and I am more and more unsure if it is, because of … see above. and especially (although you’re sick of hearing it) because you killed your ONE truly stand-out feature, the questions “anytype vs. product X” has become purely a question of comparing features. and here … anytype kinda loses.

as for the “pro” side – anytype has some really clever ideas – granted. also you have a TON of users who WANT to help. @Shampra is a fantastic example, he really is doing a lot of your work – and apparently he’s not even using the software primarily himself, if I got that correctly.

so to me it seems … without really including your user base – i’m not sure that’s going to be enough, and it also seems to me you’re not getting better at this.

21

Half yes, half no …
I’m not sure if I did the right steps. Deleting all the cache folders in the work directory didn’t help.
Also deleting (renaming) the folder “objectstore” didn’t help.

I also wasn’t able to find a post in the forum that explains the correct procedure (although I’m sure such post exists). Could you help please?

23

The new Calendar drag and drop and the Timeline are awesome! (0.46.33-alpha)!
The timeline will be great for my tasks, since I use “Scheduled date” and “Due date” … so they will be start date and end date!

I have done the forbidden thing!