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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Basic navigation and selection should work as well as the text editors which come with your OS. eg when you press the up arrow, the cursor should move up a line, but stay in the same x pos. When line above is short, you should still be able to "round trip" by arrowing down again.
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