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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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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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.
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Horacio Herrera
@hhg2288
what are "table-stakes editing operations"? after watching the video, I guess is that the selection (caret) bounce too much or in unexpected ways?
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Basic navigation and selection should work as well as the text editors which come with your OS. eg when you press the up arrow, the cursor should move up a line, but stay in the same x pos. When line above is short, you should still be able to "round trip" by arrowing down again.
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Hibai Unzueta
@hanbzu
I wonder how important that really is once you're either (1) editing text in a block char by char, or (2) editing at the block level instead of at a char level. If I move my cursor outside of the block, maybe I could go into block mode.
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