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Text editing hates you too (2019)

lord.io

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#11

Post by Oddskar »

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in understanding intent and doing something reasonable on behalf of the users.

An interesting example is the recent trend to start interpreting selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard". It just makes complete sense. When would I ever want it to be "please delete the selection, and instead paste the URL"? Probably not very often. This is just one tiny example, but there are lots and lots of those in text editing.

My gut feeling is a lot of the time this is all left to individual engineers to try to decipher the user intent; I would assume for the most part they either copy their peers or do a best effort guess.

What if there was some sort of test suite one could run instead? Like a large number of test cases built upon interactions with actual users.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#12

Post by jmcphers »

jll29 wrote: post #10

A good article, which shows that even plain text editing (without any formatty) is already way more complex than a layperson may appreciate. For the developer, there are some gems to be discovered when writing a text editor; recall that using regular expressions coverted to finite state machines saw the light as part of editing, and I remember being given a very cool paper (from the 1960s!) by my undergrad compiler c…

There's a new(ish) editor called Xi that's built on the rope data structure: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#13

Post by LeifCarrotson »

7373737373 wrote: post #9
bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com

I appreciate that "making a ****ing iceberg chart" is at the bottom of the Hobbies iceberg :)

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#14

Post by slver »

bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#15

Post by breischl »

Oddskar wrote: post #11

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…

>selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard"

Seems like an interesting UX debate. It's a handy shortcut, but it makes "paste" modal depending on what's in the clipboard. Pasting might replace the selected text, or might link it. And because the behavior depends on whether the clipboard text "looks like" a URL, there's an element of DWIM (Do What I Mean) in there. Does it only handle http:// links? What about www.? Or mailto:? etc.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#17

Post by oblio »

slver wrote: post #14
bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

And then we discovered that not only English speakers want to use PCs.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#18

Post by crazygringo »

slver wrote: post #14
bombcar wrote: post #4

For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.

Things are as hard as we allow them to be. You know, fixed width ascii terminals in text mode sure were much easier in the 80s

No, things are as hard as they need to be.

Fixed-width ASCII terminals didn't work for virtually anyone except English-speaking users.

Turns out the entire world needs to use computers.

That's a "need". Not "allowing".

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#19

Post by crazygringo »

Oddskar wrote: post #11

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…

> all left to individual engineers to try to decipher the user intent

When it comes to a lot of text rendering, Unicode does specify most of it along with test suites.

While text input is really mainly two large teams: one at Microsoft and one at Apple. While they probably don't talk to each other much, they probably do wind up copying each other for the benefit of users.

I'm not really sure what open-source GUI's do, but probably mainly try to copy Microsoft+Apple.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#20

Post by Steltek »

breischl wrote: post #15
Oddskar wrote: post #11

Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…

>selection of text + pasting of a link as "turn this text into a link using the URL in the clipboard" Seems like an interesting UX debate. It's a handy shortcut, but it makes "paste" modal depending on what's in the clipboard. Pasting might replace the selected text, or might link it. And because the behavior depends on whether the clipboard text "looks like" a URL, there's an element of DWIM (Do What I Mean) in ther…

I haven't experienced the behavior described but reading it, I instantly hate it. It would differ from every other program I use.

I'd counter with there should be two different paste actions in every program: plain and smart. I almost always don't want to preserve rich formatting when I paste text. It looks like my cat walked over the keyboard while I was typing. The action to paste as plain text versus a fancier/DWIMy method is often different from program to program.

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