This is the climax of what sox has been cooking his way toward, release by release, over the last few months.
What was once the preview tab on posts and comments is now also a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. Before, to add links, headings, quotes, and styling, you had to be a markdown wizard. Now, you can use a toolbar and click buttons like most editors you're familiar with.
The important part of this, and where sox put a ton of energy, is that the markdown editing experience is preserved. When editing a post or comment, you can switch between markdown and wysiwyg modes and see the changes you make in one reflected in the other. The wysiwyg, what we're calling compose for lack of a better name, is an editable preview of the markdown, and write is a editable representation of the markdown "source code" for the work you do in compose.
In many ways this is the beginning of our plans for the editor experience. It's the main way everyone makes SN what they want it to be and we want to maximize that. Before too long we'll add image resizing and, yes, a table editor, but we plan to go much further.
Sox is standing by for any bugs you find or suggestions you might have. Oh, and any complements of course.
Also, big shout to @optimism who has been helping us put the engineering back in software engineering.
i wrote this comment in the
wysiwyg.i think it is pretty cool.
well done, @soxwell done, @sox
reallycool.
double click
Probably very naive question...
This seems like it has been quite the work and endeavour. Yet, I'm surprised that's the case. Isn't an editor like the most common thing in online platforms? Aren't there out of the box solutions that achieve what you want, with extreme levels of customisation?
Or are those mostly crappy and not to SN standards?
Genuinely asking, I'm sure there is a reason @sox put so much time and love in this.
We are using what most people would consider an out of the box solution - and some people ship to customers as-is.[1]
The problem with most editors is that they tend to do one thing (markdown) or the other (wysiwyg) to an okay degree, but none of them do markdown and wysiwyg compatibility to this degree. (Try using any other website's hybrid editor, doing some ambitious styling and switch back and forth between modes.)
In the hopes of protocoling SN someday, we want to keep markdown as the base encoding of content here. Yet, in the interest of helping folks from any walk of life participate on SN, we want to make adding nice content to SN easy.
Yes. Do you have one you love the most and wish it were everywhere?
All of this work is the extreme customization part of an out of the box solution. Our customization needs just go beyond add new styling options.
We have bugs fixed in our editor that even Facebook hasn't fixed in their products yet, and they are the ones working on the underlying library. ↩
Ngl SN increased my markdown skills haha
But this tool bar will be very welcomed
Awww shewt I got underline now!! Formatt junkies unite!
Whoa cool.
What would you say are your biggest roadmap priorities now?
For the editor or generally?
Generally.
User facing:
> Also, big shout to @optimism who has been helping us put the engineering back in software engineering.
In what sense?
Also, good job!
Generally, he's been pushing for more rigor in dev processes and alerting us to how accessible rigor is now.
Huzzah!
Amazing work @sox!
Yooo
# congrats ~lol nice job