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.
In this video, I attempt to arrow up/down and shift+up/down to select inter-line in 8 outliners. Very yikes.
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.
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.
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.
There'd be a lot of value in finding a good abstraction here.
Incidentally, the Cocoa text system is a remarkably good text editing abstraction, and it's accreted improvements over three decades since its introduction in NeXTStep. It does a great job of supporting simultaneous use of multiple levels of abstraction.
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