Conversation

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.

1:45

14K views

245

Clem

@_clem

Sep 8, 2021

Not inter-line selection, but back in the

@usecanvas

days (which was block-based) I think we did a good job with inter-line nav. Similar to macOS, we cached the x-offset at the beginning of a user's vertical movement and placed the cursor as close to that offset as text allowed.

Clem

@_clem

Sep 8, 2021

That said, we of course missed a lot of other things. On the web at least, we’re still at a place where either a) you invest a ton into non-block-based and do OK (ProseMirror being gold standard) or b) you do your best and try to sell your users block-based as an “improvement”.

Replying to

and

It does actually look like ProseMirror nails the core outline editing interactions. I wonder why more outliners don't use it?

9:15 PM · Sep 8, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

It’s very good, but the API can be difficult to work with if you need to venture outside of ProseMirror’s norm. I think that TipTap tiptap.dev, built on ProseMirror, is doing a great job of making the API more accessible.

tiptap.dev

Headless WYSIWYG Text Editor – Tiptap Editor

Clem

@_clem

Sep 8, 2021

There are also some bugs and PM source is full of workarounds for various issues on different platforms. Quickly typing a character and then hitting enter over and over on mobile Safari is buggy, for example.