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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All Computers Are Punished
@nsfmc
agree 100% with everything, but feel like draftjs gets an honorable mention in this case. my feeling is these "know it when you feel it" things are too poorly defined outside of "it's what cocoa does" (which i often experience as "this dropdown doesn't… feel right?")
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Sophie Alpert
@sophiebits
browser rich text editing sucks but I did my best in draftjs to preserve and/or emulate native behavior one editor I use regularly at work treats Cmd-Backspace as if I did Shift-Up, Backspace (i.e. deletes part of the previous line too) and it drives me up the wall
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