Conversation

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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Eirik Bakke
@eirikbakke
People often don't realize how many details must be implemented for even a minimum viable text editor, spreadsheet etc. And if you want to improve the state of the art, you often have to reinvent the wheel before you even get started on the innovative stuff.
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wil shipley
@wilshipley
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
and
@eirikbakke
At Omni we were commissioned early on in the Java years to write a Java rich-text editor widget. Was fun applying all the learning from ~15 years of NeXTstep, but obviously we did NOT win the widget wars and ours got thrown out with a ton of babies and kiloliters of bathwater.
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