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Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

novel.sh

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Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#42

Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?

What issues specifically? In general, :has and :user-invalid are new and can be useful styling forms.

No real issues i think, but take this HN input box i'm typing in now. It's .. okay, like.. it's about as barebones as you can get. CSS has seen a ton of advancements in just about every area (it feels like atleast. As a backend dev), but yet this HN box still feels them same as it did in 1995 heh.

I see so many huge JS beasts with WYSIWYG features that i'm unsure what advancements, if any, have been made for CSS to provide something nice. Something that a user would feel it's more than nothing done at all.

The HN box feels like nothing at all. Just a plain HTML input text area.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#43

Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?

Rich text editing is probably not possible or not worth it. However, most people who disable JS are probably fine with not using rich text and definitely shouldn’t expect it. Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor.

> Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor.

Any examples that you can think of which make a plain text area half-decent? So many sites go with heavy-JS options that i'm not sure what is possible for a good (half decent) visual editing experience in just CSS

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the answer anyone was expecting, but SharePoint Online. Wiki pages, every list you create is a SQL table with a robust API, and the power platform is one of the best no/low code solutions available. I create full react applications around this and host the SPA in a SharePoint document library.

Can you recommend a good tutorial?

I will try to gather some resources later tonight. If needed I’ll type up something more comprehensive.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#45

Are there any examples of something similar that has the ability to seamlessly interact with tables as well? Notion seems to be the only player in the space that effectively uses its tables as linkable databases, most similar products seem to either lack table functionality or they're just simple formatted text. So much of my daily work revolves around databases and Excel, I would love the ability to have multiple vi…

Not the answer anyone was expecting, but SharePoint Online. Wiki pages, every list you create is a SQL table with a robust API, and the power platform is one of the best no/low code solutions available. I create full react applications around this and host the SPA in a SharePoint document library.

... I'm not sure if this is the greatest idea I've ever heard, or if I want to immediately run away screaming.

I've always thought SharePoint was terribly slow, but that was just from experience interacting with the web interface itself. Does the API perform well? Or is there that same inherent latency to put up with?

And do you have any general tips/ideas/learnings to share about using SharePoint in this way? I definitely want to give this a try.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#46

Are there any examples of something similar that has the ability to seamlessly interact with tables as well? Notion seems to be the only player in the space that effectively uses its tables as linkable databases, most similar products seem to either lack table functionality or they're just simple formatted text. So much of my daily work revolves around databases and Excel, I would love the ability to have multiple vi…

Have you heard of Obsidian? It's a note-taking app build on locally stored markdown files with bidirectional linking and a great ecosystem of third party plugins. One of the most popular plugins is https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview which lets you treat your notes as databases and query them to form tables. The creator has been working on its successor, Datacore https://github.com/blacksmithgu/datacore…

I have used Obsidian before, and the lack of any excel-like functionality (Dataview just wasn't enough) was what drove me to Notion. I'll keep an eye on Datacore though, it does seem like it might be able to achieve enough of what I'm looking to do.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#47

Tangent: On the note of web based text field for "normal users", what's the best UX you can get while also trying to be as no-JS-friendly as possible? Are there CSS-only tricks to make editing in an input field nice? I'm making a low-JS site, but it also has a lot of input fields, user content generation, etc. In "modern CSS" i feel like Input boxes should be better than they are. Is JS the only way?

Not quite sure what you mean by normal. But if you want a nice input field - as in it allows you to input text and does what you expect with plain text, something like water.css maybe. If you want rich text, the Web was designed to offload this to js. Markdown and other similar systems were created to provide an alternative to this, but there's a barrier to entry because you want more than text. Text plus markup requires interpretation and either a ux that adds tooling or the user to do some learning.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich text editing is probably not possible or not worth it. However, most people who disable JS are probably fine with not using rich text and definitely shouldn’t expect it. Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor.

> Just add a CSS stylesheet which turns into something half-decent, put a note that markdown is supported, and make a plain text editor. Any examples that you can think of which make a plain text area half-decent? So many sites go with heavy-JS options that i'm not sure what is possible for a good (half decent) visual editing experience in just CSS

Are you looking to avoid the js tooling ecosystem? As in, just an html file with script tags is fine?

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#49
For a text editor like this a base LLM would be more appropriate, one that does just autocomplete, without being instruction tuned. Unfortunately these base models are either unavailable (GPT-4), outdated (GPT-3/davinci) or otherwise restricted (GPT-3.5 aka code-davinci-002 is only available via Microsoft Azure and more expensive than the instruction tuned GPT-3.5-turbo model).

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source Notion-style WYSYWIG editor

#50
post #35

What if I need to type a note with C++ in it? ;)

Not sure why that seems like a challenge, but it's trivial since 2001. Use a codeblock.

++ triggers AI autocomplete; a whole wall of text of autocomplete.

So the question was likely: how to write the word "C++" in your prose (as opposed to writing some C++ code)

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