After waffling for a while, I’ve decided to write a new web text editor for Micro.blog. The new editor will be lightweight and work consistently across platforms, especially mobile. Here’s a video of my progress so far… Still a long way to go, it looks better than it is. Learning a lot.

@manton Great start; definitely looking forward to this. And, as always, glad to see you responsive to the community’s conversation. 🙏

@manton and here I thought the current one was super slick! perhaps second only to @write_as in terms of reliable, intuitive, frugal as heck composition on mobile. (I do believe they are the only two text boxes on the web in which I have *never* lost work.)

if I were @photomatt @ev, etc, right now (or... for the past 10+ years lol,) I'd be lobbin six, ebben figures at your particular sensibility.

@manton Any chance of an additional WYSIWYG editor so posting in markdown isn’t the only option?

@tchambers No, we're going to stick with Markdown. However, I think it'd be really interesting to see third-party apps embrace WYSIWYG. For example, MarsEdit on Mac has a rich text editor that works with Micro.blog.

@manton and.... auto save? yes? yes please? please please? pleassssssse 🤞🏻

@DavidBlue Thanks!

@jtr 👍 Should be possible. I'm hoping this new system will give us more flexibility for things like that.

@manton @tchambers strong product vision. I respect it. Bit biased though I hate WYSIWYG. Markdown is great because What-You-Paste-Is-What-You-Copied (WYPIWYC).

@manton do you use #Obsidian by any chance? Very similar style of formatting markdown on the fly.

@manton don't forget this little check box right beneath the text field: Post Title. Thanks. Love.

@manton Looks like a good start. I'd love to be able to drag-and-drop and paste images. Right now I'm using Ulysses for multi-image posts, which seems like using a very complex tool for a simple task.

@manton Looks great. I'm sure it'll be awesome when done.

@manton yesssssss 🎉

@jeromechoo I don't use Obsidian regularly but I have experimented with it and really like what they've done.

@manton Thanks for that update, Manton….

@manton Could you please make it support HTML? At least for lists and such. There's a good reason not to do this for links because spammers.

@manton I like writing HTML. It's a whole lot of fun.

@manton ❤️

@ladyhope Yes, there will be some HTML support too. And Markdown can be good for simple lists.

@manton I'm not sure how doable it is, but would be awesome if this text editor supported the tab character. It's always frustrating on the web when you press tab in a multiline text editor and it switches focus to the next input element. Excited to see what you can do!

@nick Great point, that bugs me too. I'll experiment with this.

@manton @jtr Oh yes please! And character counts when editing a published post. 🙏

@manton and mars.edit on Mac is amazing. Thank you for supporting it. (I have no connection to mars edit, just a happy customer)

@manton In my opinion, it would be awesome if you could allow users to enter emojis in your editor using a shortcode. Like :smile: or :heart: that could be replaced by your editor respectively with 😀 and ❤️

@manton Unfortunately I like to order my own lists so when it does the automatic numbering thing, it makes me a bit anxious. That's just my weirdness though, not markdowns fault.

@manton Kudos for taking this on! I worked on a WYSIWYG text editor, more than a decade ago now, and it was one of the most difficult things I attempted to do. But that was old frameworks and tech. Now, I prefer markdown over WYSIWYG for most cases.

@manton Coooolio. Textcasting. Let's lift the social web out of the limits of Twitter.