Integrate Nextcloud Text as editor for notes #652
Conversation
korelstar
added
the
feature: editor
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Great to see some progress here! 🥳 Will you consider implementing Context based formatting also in this PR? Because if you show the toolbar permanently and users will get used to it, it will be hard to change the behavior again in the future. |
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I like context based formatting and I would like to see it in this app. But with realizing the Text integration into the Notes app, there will be no code left in the Notes app regarding editor features. This means, that if the Notes app should provide context-based formatting, then this has to be implemented in the Text app. Therefore: no, this will be not part of this PR. Nevertheless, context-based formatting could be classified as a release-critical feature. This would mean, that we won't merge this PR until Text has implemented this feature. As listed in #331 (comment), there are also other issues of this criticality. Hence, the time for merging this seems to be far away anyway. On the other hand, I don't even know if context-based formatting is a desired feature in the Text app. This has to be discussed with the Text people and the design people. Maybe you could assess this from your perspective? @nextcloud/text @nextcloud/designers (and also /cc @nextcloud/notes ) |
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Nice :) Let me comment on some of the points here:
I feat that we might never be able to fully preserve the original formatting. The main reason is that the WYSIWYG editor does not preserve the original format but converts the markdown document to a different document format (a json tree with different node types like h1/li and annotation types like italic/bold) and then on save converts this json format back to markdown. Taking lists as an example we just don't know when saving if the original markdown file was written with
Yes, we have some ideas about automatically merging the outside changes into the history of the collaboratively edited document, however this will be quite some effort to get to.
I'm open to discuss this, the main personal concern here is that the formatting with a popover like shown by @jancborchardt in #200 is not really discoverable in my oppinion. Regarding the general usage of the text app component I think your approach is fine for a first attempt. Ideally we would have the editor available as a dedicated libary that could then just be used in apps. I started in https://github.com/juliushaertl/nextcloud-text/ however didn't have much time to continue with that recently. Also let me know if I shall add you to the text conversation on our Nextcloud Talk instance, I think you already have an account there if you want to discuss something quickly. |
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It might also be worth to have a look at https://gitlab.com/collectivecloud/collectives which @azul and @mejo- built last year as a prototype fund project which is based on Nextcloud Text in a similar way. |
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Hey Julius, thanks for your clear statement on the WYSIWYG problematic. This helps me to look at this from the right perspective. I'm pretty sure, that some users won't like this approach, since they use the Notes app with externally generated files. But you're right, we have to weigh the pros and cons. The most important thing IMHO is that the Notes app should still work seamlessly with the Android Notes app. My first impression was, that there will some more issues after integrating Text (besides the synchronization issue) due to the strong CommonMark based WYSIWYG approach. I will investigate that further (maybe @stefan-niedermann can also do some tests?). Nevertheless, please add me to the Talk channel for Text, I'm already on that NC instance for other channels. I also took a look on the collectivecloud project (accidentally) and took some code from their integration approach. That was a good starting point! :-) |
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Hey @korelstar ... i thought that approach looked familiar 😃 - happy it was useful. It has worked for us so far but it's really not a clean implementation. I'll be back to working more on the collectives app in march and maybe i can also take a stab at a cleaner way of using the text app in other contexts. |
When deciding how to handle this situation, please see the comments in the two issue threads mentioned. In particular, nextcloud/text#772 (comment) seems to resonate. I agree that the tradeoffs as discussed by @juliushaertl are reasonable for a rich content editor but not for one that is set up as the default editor of (and then destroyer of) markdown files. For example, on iOS, it seems to be the only option now; the old edit in plain text option seems unavailable even when the new Text app is disabled. If this new editor is not intended to perform the functions of a proper markdown editor, then it probably should not handle markdown files at all given the destructive side-effects. Give these "Nextcloud rich text format" files and notes that it creates their own file extension to avoid this situation where markdown files created in other applications get destroyed. Basically, if it is only capable of handling markdown files in the "Nextcloud rich text format", it shouldn't be using .md files because nobody else uses the "Nextcloud rich text format" for their .md files. The best time to make this kind of change from a user's perspective would be during a large integration like this. Edit: |
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Hi there, |
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We are going to expose the text app editor through an API, so I'll close this in favour of #958 |
Currently, this is just a proof-of-concept. See #331 for more information.
Screenshots
Before: Edit mode
Before: Preview mode
After: WYSIWYG edit mode (replaces old edit mode and old preview mode)
Open Tasks
regarding Notes app
regarding Text app
regarding Text integration in Notes app