One reason we don't have more interesting, quality structured text editors: it's *really* hard to implement table-stakes editing operations well, particularly on web.
In this video, I attempt to arrow up/down and shift+up/down to select inter-line in 8 outliners. Very yikes.
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Roam was the only web outliner which got arrow up/down navigation mostly right, though with some unexpected glitches at EOLs.
None of the web outliners support interline selection. OO doesn't either. Bear does great but ofc isn't really structured. And org-mode wins the day.
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This sounds so nit-picky and trivial, but I think the difficulty of getting basic editing ops done well in simple outline UX illustrates just how painful it is to make a structured text editor nice enough to live in.
There'd be a lot of value in finding a good abstraction here.
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Incidentally, the Cocoa text system is a remarkably good text editing abstraction, and it's accreted improvements over three decades since its introduction in NeXTStep. It does a great job of supporting simultaneous use of multiple levels of abstraction.
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And this becomes a big blocker for things like annotations.
A supreme irony being the web has evolved to present sophisticated multimedia to everyone but doesn't afford great interfaces for producing it.
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Super hard. I worked on this a lot when I was working on Cicerone (HTML editor side-project). I got it working pretty well, but the maintenance burden and dealing with edge-cases was unappealing.
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I pushed it pretty far too, with drag-select and drag-and drop that clones or moves nested blocks depending on whether the selection fully encloses them or not.
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Natural text selection and drag to move in Cicerone HTML content editor. Oh, and Undo too.
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Not inter-line selection, but back in the days (which was block-based) I think we did a good job with inter-line nav. Similar to macOS, we cached the x-offset at the beginning of a user's vertical movement and placed the cursor as close to that offset as text allowed.
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You can definitely select inter-line regions with both the mouse and the shift-arrow keys in Codex ...
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