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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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John Gruber

@gruber

Sep 8, 2021

However, I think I’m with you that I’d *prefer* if OmniOutliner supported inter-line text selection ranges.

Guy English

@gte

Sep 8, 2021

It’s really hard. I’ve tried. It could work but never as well as you’d want.

Replying to

and

Striking that Bear and other straight-NSTextView-based implementations can pull this off! Naively curious why something like OO can't be implemented with a custom NSLayoutManager, attachments, etc?

11:35 PM · Sep 8, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

That was the path I took. It certainly can be. It is a bunch of work that ends up being difficult to maintain. Dragging lines around. Multiple selection of lines. If I’ve eight non-consecutive lines selected over various depths of hierarchy and type what happens? Gets weird fast.

Kyle S.

@optshiftk

Sep 9, 2021

FWIW, this is why a lot of apps don't support multiple selection, which is already built into NSTextView.

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