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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

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

1:31 AM · Oct 19, 2021TweetDeck

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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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Yeah, for a while I worried "this is like programming, which means it will confuse people" but I think programming-like syntax is easy enough for anyone to adopt quickly, its everything else about programming that can be tricky.