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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

Sep 8, 2021

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.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 8, 2021

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

Sep 8, 2021

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...?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 8, 2021

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.

8:50 PM · Sep 8, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

The really unusual thing about the Cocoa API is that it offers abstractions at 3+ levels, all composed without hidden "magic," so that you can always "drop down" and get extra control over some behavior, while retaining as much high-level default behavior as possible.

Domenic Denicola

@domenic

Sep 8, 2021

That sounds magical. The web is in a bad place with editing APIs indeed, with them having grown organically. It's often hard to fill in such a middle... If you *can* do it on top of the low-level APIs, the incentive to spec/implement/evangelize a mid-level API is low.

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