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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Nathan Manousos
@trafnar
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
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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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Nathan Manousos
@trafnar
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.
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