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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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Zach Waugh
@zachwaugh
I wonder if this is mostly due to how much simpler it is to make a block-based editor vs a text-based editor. I did a bit of exploration there for my own native iOS editor. Going block-based means you lose all inter-block interactions, but much more extensible
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Zach Waugh
@zachwaugh
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I’m working on a side project similar to Bear/Dropbox Paper/Notion/Craft where you can have a document with text/todos/lists/images all together. I’m curious how you would implement this on iOS?
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Zach Waugh
@zachwaugh
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@andy_matuschak
Good question! It was for me in my testing, but possibly just due to my lack of TextKit expertise. I could get a block-based version working trivially, but embedding custom views in a UITextView was much more complex.