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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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Nathan Manousos

@trafnar

Oct 16, 2021

I’ve been exploring the approach of using pure plaintext but augmenting it with some controls in the margin. Because I know I can’t re-implement text editing to my own standards. I feel like this can be taken pretty far. My work so far: tasktxt.com

Nathan Manousos

@trafnar

Oct 16, 2021

I also built a little bookmark manager app with add/delete/edit/search/drag-drop features the secret is: the entire UI is a textarea, much like taskTXT. This is a kinda joke/prototype to explore the concept of using plain textarea as the UI

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This is really great, Nathan. I've been collecting some notes on interfaces of this kind, trying to feel out the edges. One thing I notice is that it seems they can only "hold" so much structure. e.g. multi-paragraph "items" are very difficult to negotiate

1:30 AM · Oct 19, 2021TweetDeck

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and

It's interesting how—particularly as you introduce more functionality—they increasingly expose "parsing" and "syntax" to users.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 19, 2021

Incidentally, is there a name for this paradigm? I've been calling it "decorated plaintext"—the aspiration to the core editing interactions and data fluidity of plaintext editors, but with some of the higher-level semantics/affordances of structured block editors.

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You're right about long items, my solution would be to break things up into something like pages sooner rather than later. I'd like the barrier for doing that to be as low as possible. I'd really like to further explore a design-tool like canvas for organizing text.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 19, 2021

(The sibling-paragraph issue has been relevant for me exploring a textual canvas for question/answer pairs… for shorter prompts, "Foo bar? Baz." works pretty well as a one-liner syntax, but I don't think I can get away with it in general, alas)