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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.

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.

Domenic Denicola

@domenic

I'm curious what about this is especially difficult on the web? Is it that other platforms give you these sorts of behaviors with some built-in configuration option, or...?

8:48 PM · Sep 8, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

@domenic

As you suggest, I think the problem is not the web itself but the huge amount of detail to get right here, with not enough platform support to make it easy. The Cocoa text editing API does remarkably well here… but it's been refined over 3 decades!

Replying to

and

The abstractions on the web are either too high-level for complex application needs (contentEditable alone) or too low-level to get the details right (raw editing events). There's a missing middle.