9 ms·

Bike: Innovative Rich Text Editing

548 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

Ptchd 4y ago
In Firefox, I enable the cursor mode to solve the link problem... I can click anywhere and the select the text using the keyboard.
winnie_ua 4y ago
Really nice features announced. I guess it can be adopted by other editors. That's a bummer that it is Mac only, no Linux support, and even Windiws!! WTF? And ideally it could be opensource) I hope new tools would emerge, that implement this ideas.
blakewatson 4y ago
Now that I've used this, I want it everywhere there is rich text.
emptyparadise 4y ago
I'm surprised that no other text editor has these text caret features already.
- laserbeam 4y ago
  It's not actually a straightforward idea. It's just good design. No project manager will ask for it (just as no one asked for multiple cursors until sublime came along and won lots of hearts with it). There's plenty of space for such ideas which will all feel stunning. But, surprising they were not made before, neah...
  - allenu 4y ago
    Good points. I think this is a great example of where an individual can really innovate on their own, but they do need to have a good mix of experience with developing on a particular platform as well as a good sense for UX. Working in a larger company, you tend to have each of those tasks (implementing vs designing) split out into multiple roles, making it very difficult to know what's possible to innovate, plus experience levels often differ, so newer designers may not know the limitations on a platform, so may over-design, and developers may not have experience to implement certain things, so they may limit the end result as well.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Please see footnote in linked article. Like all ideas it's probably been invented many times before. But also like all ideas you need to invent, make good implementation, and then hopefully luck into people finding out a about it.
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    Of course, but it doesn't seem that any currently available text editor has this. Even the one mentioned in the Stack Overflow post is now gone, it seems. Still, this looks amazing - thank you for implementing it. Would love to see this formatting UI used in more apps going forward.
cush 4y ago
I want these features on every text caret everywhere. Love the typing affinity tail!
cycomanic 4y ago
That sounds an awful lot like what emacs is doing in org mode (if you configure it too). I have to say, it's often nice, but sometime still gets in the way of editing in my experience. So I'm often conflicted if I want this or pure editing of the org without the rendering.
- matthberg 4y ago
  I was just going to comment about how bringing features like this to org would be great. Do you know if there's a way to have caret affinity displayed in org, or equivalents for the other features mentioned? Sorry if they're obvious features, I'm a bit rusty on the latest developments.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  I'd like to see what emacs/org mode is doing ... is there a link to documentation, of demo video somewhere?
mdmglr 4y ago
Text affinity and the command pallet is innovative. Could probably bundle this up as a Objective-C library that acts as a drop in replacement for UITextView/NSTextView. Perhaps a JS/WebComponent library for <textarea> as well. I’m sure you could extract some revenue with licensing those libraries or tech support.
keizo 4y ago
The caret tail is rad
kybernetyk 4y ago
Respect. This must have been a pain to implement. (I still have PTSD from writing a text editor for macOS).
- pandatigox 4y ago
  Hello! I keep asking this, but do you have any good resources for doing that? For example, any repos you would recommend studying? Thanks!
  - jessegrosjean 4y ago
    I've spent a lot of time reading through these codebases and found that reading very useful. - https://codemirror.net https://codemirror.net - https://prosemirror.net https://prosemirror.net - https://xi-editor.io https://xi-editor.io
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Writing the text editor has certainly been painful and taken me a long time. This particular feature (typing affinity) isn't actually to hard and I think could be bolted on to most existing edit editors. Really you just need to take one extra bit of state... and then can calculate cursor drawing + moment based on that state and all the other state the editor normally tracks.
leobg 4y ago
Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t read HN. Else you’re going to see that bundled with Office in no time. \s
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Heh, I'm actually finding MS Word a good source for autocorrect ideas.
tobr 4y ago
Very nice. I love these little innovations, it’s exactly the type of design ideas that makes me want to try an app. I wonder if it’s an intentional easter egg that the keyboard shortcuts in the popover spell out “bischl”… which is more than a little reminiscent of “bicycle”. (Could improve it by replacing “h” for “highlight” with “y” for “yellow”: “bisycl”.)
- DecoPerson 4y ago
  I was expecting them to say “..as easy as riding a bike.”
- morsch 4y ago
  Having it start with B I was pretty much a given, since that's how it's always been. https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/microsoft-word https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/microsoft-word
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  No easter eggs in Bike yet... though I should add something someday. At the moment just trying to get features in to make it a good place to work and think.
chubs 4y ago
So many great ideas here. Brilliant UX! Congrats :)
- fatboy 4y ago
  Yeah a lot of love has gone into that. I like the subtle animations as the caret slides rightwards whilst typing or the "_I_" appears above it when he sets it to italic.
mdp2021 4y ago
> Those formatting characters are always visible My solution, when I coded my own word processor, was to use a single, invisible control character, '¶' ¹. So, for example, bold would be enclosed by '¶b' and '¶B', and a first-level heading would be a line starting with '¶1'. So, there exist characters in the text that are invisible but you know are there: you can insert the couple and delete it just like any other character. ¹(part of the extended character set - '¶' is easily accessible on some systems as [AltGr]+[R])
- xigoi 4y ago
  How is that different from HTML tags?
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > How is that different Two chars - fixed amount. One control, one command. Just cleaner, simple and functional. It's something you type, and it is hidden, you want it to be short and clear. «How is that different», more literally: it is markup, like in htMl, but it is a special markup for that other special purpose of direct rich text tagging in word processors, not for hypertext (HTml). I called it differently, but if you so fancy, it is DRTTIWPML.
schipplock 4y ago
The video, demonstrating the features of the rich text editor, is well done. Now I want to try this Bike app (unfortunately I have no mac). I hope more developers will copy this whenever they are implementing a rich text editor.
- a3w 4y ago
  For me, it was too long and verbose: instead of showing with no prior knowledge, it starts telling me how intuitive stuff will be. Also the sound started activated and by clicking, as instructed by the blinking text, I disabled it, which was confusing.
samwillis 4y ago
The "affinity cursor" is a really lovely innovation. Most HTML/DOM/contenteditable based rich text editors end up adding support for virtual cursors that enable you to have the insertion cursor somewhere that the native browser cursor hasn't got support for (next to a floating image, end of a table row). Effectively this is what this is doing. Internally the inline formatting will be marked as tags in a rage, exactly like html. Essentially there is a possible cursor position both inside and outside a formatting tag, but both appear as the same visual location on the screen. This is such a lovely way to indicate the difference. So with this code: Something bold There are two cursor positions that are visually the same place: Something ||bold ^ ^ Most editors "jump" over one of those positions to hide the implementation detail from users. This idea exposes it with a little tail on the cursor.
- felixfbecker 4y ago
 I really wish browsers would support this for `contenteditable` (even without the tail, just having some way to put the cursor in either position, maybe based on from what direction the cursor is coming from). Slack's message editor is `contenteditable`-based, and it means there is absolutely no way to put the cursor inside at the beginning of e.g. an inline code snippet. Despite the code snippet formatting having an outline border and some padding, meaning it should be possible to even click inside or outside the snippet unambiguously just with your mouse, Chrome will always place it in the same spot and you have to do the awkward trick of replacing the first character. This single behavior makes `contenteditable` so terrible
 - samwillis 4y ago
 It is possible via JS to place the cursor in that position. The issue is the a native browser cursor navigation skips over it. It would be quite possible to implement this on a contenteditable editor. That particular bug with slack would be possible to fix with JS. The particular difference about that style is there is a little bit of padding at the start of the style. Bowsers have no understanding of clicking on that padding to select inside the the beginning of the inline style.
elygre 4y ago
How does the affinity cursor work when there are multiple formats applied? For example, “text” has three insertion points shown with the pipe character: “|||text”
- samwillis 4y ago
 Internally a lot of editors don't nest inline styles like that. The formatting is more like a style attribute on a tag, listing all style properties. So you still only have two positions, previous formatting to the left, new formatting to the right. I suspect that is how Bike is doing it.
 - jessegrosjean 4y ago
 This is correct.
- laserbeam 4y ago
 If I were implementing this, I would ignore the middle one. There's virtually nothing visible to the user that there is a middle one OR that is actually placed before . I feel handling this edgecase causes more UX problems than not.
 - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
 The approach I took with my own hacky editor component was to highlight the styles that currently apply at the caret position via toggle buttons for B, I, etc. This is something word processors have been doing for decades, although I recognise it's far from a perfect solution.
practal 4y ago
Brilliant idea. I am actually just researching how to build my own structured document editor for the web, based on my parsing engine for Pyramid grammars, and I'll certainly examine how to apply this idea in my context.
IshKebab 4y ago
This is genius. Very clear explanation of what's wrong with rich text editing too. Especially frustrating in Slack. On desktop they support "Mrkdwn" (a bastardisation of Markdown) but there's no way to do custom link text with it at all! The only way is if you switch to their shitty WYSIWYG editor. In their app I think you can only use WYSIWYG, but it's full of insane flaws, like if you open a code span (backticks) and then close it but don't immediately enter some more text then there is literally no way to escape it into normal text again. You have to delete the whole code span and start again. If anyone from Slack is reading this, fix your shit!
geniium 4y ago
Simple and clean, I like it.
daretorant 4y ago
This looks awesome. I do all my writing (creative writing, outlining, todos) in Bear and really love it. But this app seems like it would make outlining more fun and intuitive. Def gonna try it! Great to see fresh, innovate apps like this that prioritize fast native experience.
nudpiedo 4y ago
I like it, specially the contextual format popup, it is sort like emacs made visual (for text format). Being a meta-shortcut I guess the more complex/options it gets, the worst.
rane 4y ago
Are there any examples out there what kind of documents people are writing with this? What's the right way to write more than one line per row? Return always just adds a new row. For instance, with Workflowy, you can hit Return+shift to add a note to row which can be as long as you want, and only the first line of it will be shown if not focused.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  I personally use it for a thinking tool... as opposed to document creating at this point. So I store notes and ideas. Process ideas. I don't author final documents. Currently there is no way to add multiple lines to a row. I "think" I would rather solve this problem by adding multiple row types (maybe heading vrs notes) and then use some sort of filtering. That's still on todo list.
chmike 4y ago
These are pretty nice ideas fixing existing problems for desktop computers. How would these work with mobile devices ? It doesn't seam compatible. Also, these are user interaction suggestions. What about the encoding ? There are plenty limitations with Markdown (the pseudo standard) on this aspect.
iot_devs 4y ago
We really need Rich Text Editing on the web. Few years ago, I was writing a tiny note taking app, and the only viable alternative was Trix.
- jasonjmcghee 4y ago
  There are many open source Rich Text editors. The most popular is Quill, and then there are block style like EditorJS, and those meant to be very extensible like Lexical. And many more- try searching for "Quill alternatives"
caseyf 4y ago
So nice. I use Notion daily at work and these ideas solve so many annoyances that repeat over and over
fuzzygroup 4y ago
I'm a very, very happy HogBay customer. Two comments: the product is high quality and the support is outstanding. Recommended.
robenkleene 4y ago
This is the second time in 8 days that something I submitted first made it to the front page from someone else's repost less than 24 hours later. What am I doing wrong? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480410
- mritchie712 4y ago
  I think a lot of getting to the front page depends on your random luck of the first 10 people that see the post. If enough of those 10 like your thing, it gets seen by thousands more and may make it to the front page. If none of those 10 do, it's fades away. It's 10 people out of millions that visit HN, so there's a lot of variability. You could post the exact same thing 15 minutes later then the first time and get a totally different "first 10" and that post could perform completely differently.
  - robenkleene 4y ago
    Yeah, all good points. I guess I'm partially just confused about the dupe detector. E.g., when I post something that someone else has already submitted recently, it just redirects me to the existing post. Re the luck factor, part of the appeal of Hacker News is there seems to be a lot of work done to minimize the role of luck. Which generally felt like it worked well for me historical, just not recently. Not a big deal in any event, but if there's something I should be doing differently, I'd like to do it.
    - mritchie712 4y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately I think a huge amount still comes down to luck. HN is better then any other platform (which is incredible considering how many engineers work on it) at detecting fraud (e.g. "upvote rings"). But I think a ton still comes down to the first few people that see the post.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Are we sure that there aren't some users involved in a voting ring?
maxerickson 4y ago
For puzzle one, in Microsoft Word, control+space clears direct font formatting from the cursor (or if text is selected, the selected text). So exactly a consistent way to go back to unformatted text. For puzzle two it uses some opaque heuristic to decide where to insert the text, I wouldn't really on it, I'd right click and edit the link.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know about Control-Space on MS Word. Looking in menu's I see "Clear Formatting" menu item, but the shortcut isn't listed. How did you know about this shortcut?
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    I don't remember. I spend quite a bit of time editing in Word and usually end up searching if there is something I think should be possible and don't know how to do, and I'll keep an eye out for other tidbits when reading.
account-5 4y ago
Is there a Windows / Linux alternative to this. I was excited to be reading about this prior to realising it was Mac only.
- criddell 4y ago
  Other than games on Windows, it seems like the Mac is the only desktop operating system with anything interesting happening on it. Workflowy is what I use. It's cross platform, but a lot clunkier than this.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Is that really true? I had a feeling that macOS desktop developers are on the decline. There are certainly a lot of Windows-only apps that are quite nice. Further, as a person trying to develop a cross-platform, desktop-only GUI framework and applications, macOS is absolutely the worst offender on nearly everything. From only supporting an outdated OpenGL version to requiring that windows are managed on the main thread. Neither Windows nor Linux have either of these limitations.
mistercow 4y ago
I love all of these features. The link part is a little rough. I think this is the best choice out of a space or bad options, but it sucks that it means that the thing a link does 99% of the time has to be flipped on its head. I don’t see a good alternative though; if you make it an “edit” button instead of a “visit” button, you make normal text editing super inconvenient, and that’s the effect users will usually want in an editor.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  I agree it's not perfect. In particular it's a little weird to highlight the link text blue since it's not what you interact with. Mostly just makes it easy to see and then find the link button, also useful if you are planning to publish a document so that you can see where the links will be in published document. One feature that I do like about this design is it's pretty generic. For example in the future I could imagine detecting dates and then insert a button after the detected date to interact with calendar. I think the general idea of inserting simple interaction button in text can be quite useful.
sgallant 4y ago
Happy to see this here! I'm a long time fan of Jesse's work [1] and love seeing independent software developers ship their own products. 1. https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/about/ https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/about/
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Thanks :)
leephillips 4y ago
“Those formatting characters are always visible. They make my text look messy.” This problem was solved in Vi with highlighting and concealing: the formatting characters are hidden and the target formatting is approximated until you move the cursor to edit the formatted bit. I’m sure Emacs has an equivalent.
codethief 4y ago
This looks really nice. If only it weren't Mac-only. :(
nbzso 4y ago
Affinity cursor and formatting tooltips are cool. Sadly, only for macOS. I am a long time Apple user, but knowing Apple's direction, cannot invest in software made only for macOS. Obsidian gives me everything I need, and mostly a multiplatform confidence.
canadiantim 4y ago
Is there any hope of turning this editor into a web-embeddable rich test editor like eg tiptap? Would love that and would gladly pay for it.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Sorry, I'm tried web tech in previous apps. This time I wanted build native, and I don't have resources to do it all. What I would love... Take a look at Bike's file format, it's just a subset of HTML. Would love to someone to write a web based editor for Bike's file format. Then you could edit Bike files anywhere you want... and also have cool native experience on Mac. Also note that Bike does read/write .txt and .opml.
jessegrosjean 4y ago
I'm Bike's developer. Thanks everyone for the comments. While I have the eyeballs I hope you don't mind me asking... I'm in process of adding autocomplete to Bike. Problem is that I generally find macOS autocomplete painful and unpredictable. I both disable it and have many typos. I'm not talking so much about the suggestions, but about the surrounding UI. I'm looking for ideas/links for how to make autocomplete better and more predictable. I know Mac apps, I do know much else. What are your favorite autocomplete implementations past or present? If you could have a "fixed" macOS autocompletion what would it look like?
- heresie-dabord 4y ago
  > I know Mac apps, I do know much else. Possible autocomplete-related grammar error? ^_^ I'm not a user of Apple products, but in the Linux world there are code editors that enable the user to define custom completions. I find this to be an excellent productivity feature, not just for coding. The editor Geany calls them snippets.
  - jessegrosjean 4y ago
    Thanks. I agree the way that programmer text editor handles snippets is nice. I think this is a pretty good and clear UI already. For autocorrect I'm talking about corrections that are less predictable such as spelling or grammar errors. They can be very useful because they mean fixes happen without any extra work, and mean you don't see lots of red spelling errors in your document... but it's also a case where computer is doing automatic work that sometimes might be wrong. So needs good way to indicate that correction has happened and easy way to revert.
- recuter 4y ago
  Couple weeks ago the guy who implemented autocomplete on iOS went on a bit of a rant. Doesn't translate directly to macOS but useful reading: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 And just in case you or somebody isn't familiar, read this classic: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html I suggest to try and keep it simple.
padjo 4y ago
The affinity cursor is a really smart solution to such an old and common problem. Bravo! I hope more editors adopt it as a standard pattern.
airbreather 4y ago
How about we have an informal rule that if is Mac only, or Win10 only, etc that it says so in the title?
- Narishma 4y ago
  Or Linux only for that matter.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  Well, historically there is a lot of software discussed that is Linux or Win only and nobody bothered to mention that there was no Mac version... As a long time Mac user, I think a little movement in the other direction is only fair. :-)
sumitgt 4y ago
Brilliant work! Wish I was a Mac user. For the hyperlinks, it seems editing the text and visiting the link is easy. But there isn’t a way to edit the hyperlink itself quickly? Have you considered using affinity cursor along the up/down for that as well? Eg. Up updates the hyperlink content while default/down updates the link text. Not sure how it would work out UX wise. Maybe opens up a popover with cursor for the hyperlink.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  > But there isn’t a way to edit the hyperlink itself quickly? Correct. For that you need to use Formatting pallet (also in video). I did initially build it so clicking link would open a pallet with option to follow link or edit link (Pages.app) does that. But in the end felt better to make following link fast and add/edit links slower. Up/Down could work, but I think it would break text editing movement/consistency more than I would want. For example if you were down arrowing to navigate you document and then randomly hit a link it would be frustrating to see link editor instead of keep moving down.
replwoacause 4y ago
So many great ideas, loved the video, keep up the excellent work!
voidz 4y ago
Fantastic innovations. But where's the underline? :)
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  For links or for just general formatting? For links I just decided to leave out. Seemed blue was enough, and especially since link interaction in Bike only happens through link button. For general formatting I left out because underline formatting seems to be falling out of favor as a standard and when I asked in my forum most users said they didn't need it. Eventually I would like to read/write Markdown from Bike and underline isn't a part of standard Markdown.
  - dev_tty01 4y ago
    Lots of browsers format links with just a thin underline and no color change. I actually prefer that approach since it avoids the visual color clutter. Would be nice to have an option to do that instead of color. Lots of great ideas, especially the format affinity indication/control. Is that just arrow key or arrow with cmd key? If it is only the arrow key, how do you distinguish user intent to actually move the cursor vs change the affinity?
    - jessegrosjean 4y ago
      Eventually I hope to add theme support so that links can look how you want, but that's not a feature that I'll be working on super soon. The affinity is just treated as a new character position. When caret moves through that position is doesn't "move", but instead draws tail differently. So it's just normal arrow key with one extra state to move through. That extra state only happens at formatting boundaries, so generally the cost isn't too much.
wslh 4y ago
Rich text posts in HN constantly recalled this personal story that I am waiting to happen (e.g. be developed by someone else). Since the use of an early Palm Pilot [1] I wanted to have a personal wiki. It was a little awkward in that moment comparing to something like a Squeak Wiki [2]. So when the iPhone 1 appeared [3] there was another call. The first versions of iOS didn't include text selection and copy and paste to generate links to new pages. In this context I did a basic reverse engineer of the UITextView and could advance this towards the "wiki dream" but it would never be accepted in the Apple Store so I abandoned the idea that was basically without a business perspective. As tptacek [4] said recently: "For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good..." [5]. I would add: but it will be more great if they add native hyperlinks within the internal notes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiki [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535683
donatj 4y ago
I was a little sad when I figured out this was part of an app and not a rich text editor I could use in my projects.
mshockwave 4y ago
This is a neat solution! Though I wonder if this can carry over to terminal environments
amjd 4y ago
Discovered this on HN a few months ago, and it has become indispensable for me. Beautiful software with subtle, nifty innovations in UX. I love that Jesse is taking a first principles approach with this and not constraining himself with the standard text editor patterns. He's also pretty active on the support forum and very receptive to feedback.
d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
Any plans to support Math(Jax) or other latex-like math notation ?
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Unlikely in the near term. I feel like there are many other features that I need to do first. Longer term maybe?
  - d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
    Definitely like what you have now in terms of a text editor! But thanks for letting me know about math.
firexcy 4y ago
There're some other editors that have similar behaviors. AFAIK, CKEditor [1], an online rich text editing framework, is optimized for cascaded formatting tags. A <pre> or <a> element will be highlighted if the cursor is "within" its context, and when your cursor is at the edge of such an element, you can press the arrow key again to move into/out from it. [1] https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/demo https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/demo
allenu 4y ago
I really enjoy seeing how you demo the features of Bike. The design is really thought out and you do a great job of communicating how it works in simple terms. (I'm an indie Mac/iOS dev myself, so I'm going to take pointers on how you present your innovations!)
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  I find AppleScript very useful for this. I script the text input, menu items, and timings like this: menuItem("Format:Bold", 0.2) type("Efficient") press("⏎")
  - allenu 4y ago
    Good suggestion. I always forget AppleScript exists.
deleted 4y ago
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ghusbands 4y ago
The cursor affinity could be entirely subsumed by the visible typing attributes, which might be more intuitive. For both, I'd worry about the user's cursor configuration affecting things - it could be safer and more widely compatible to have it float nearby rather than have it attached to the cursor. The link editing doesn't seem like an improvement on other rich text interfaces, with no visually obvious way to edit the link destination. A keyboard shortcut that tells you other keyboard shortcuts isn't at all innovative, but it is handy and more software should have it.
bonney_io 4y ago
It always makes me smile to see Hog Bay Software releases get such positive attention. Jesse Grosjean is one of the only indie developers of note that I am aware that are based in Maine. Makes myself, the aspiring iOS developer, not feel so alone in this state. :) What Jesse is doing here for rich text editing is astounding, to me, and is exactly the type of advancement that the popular word processing apps should take note of.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Go Maine! Where are you based? Got any app links? And excuse me if I should already know your handle, I have a terrible memory.
zestyping 4y ago
Bike is beautiful! I'm tempted. But all my notes are in Notational Velocity (https://notational.net/ https://notational.net/) at the moment, because the largest source of friction for me is finding note files. In Notational Velocity I never have to open a file dialog; file dialogs on Mac OS are still shockingly slow, and even if they were fast it would take too long to find the file I want. My hands never leave the keyboard; I just type a few characters and Notational Velocity finds the correct note for me. Do you have any interest in adding an instant search feature, like Notational Velocity? I'd replace it if I could keep the fast search while being able to outline and edit with Bike's fantastic rich text capability.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Eventually yes, but not anytime soon. Right now Bike is very much a text editor, while notational velocity is more database of text files. At some point I hope to add a "workspace" aspect to Bike where you can open a directory of Bike files, but this is a long way off. For now the focus will just be to improve the text editor aspect of Bike.

548 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

In Firefox, I enable the cursor mode to solve the link problem... I can click anywhere and the select the text using the keyboard.

winnie_ua 4y ago

Really nice features announced. I guess it can be adopted by other editors. That's a bummer that it is Mac only, no Linux support, and even Windiws!! WTF? And ideally it could be opensource) I hope new tools would emerge, that implement this ideas.

blakewatson 4y ago

Now that I've used this, I want it everywhere there is rich text.

emptyparadise 4y ago

I'm surprised that no other text editor has these text caret features already.

laserbeam 4y ago
It's not actually a straightforward idea. It's just good design. No project manager will ask for it (just as no one asked for multiple cursors until sublime came along and won lots of hearts with it). There's plenty of space for such ideas which will all feel stunning. But, surprising they were not made before, neah...
- allenu 4y ago
  Good points. I think this is a great example of where an individual can really innovate on their own, but they do need to have a good mix of experience with developing on a particular platform as well as a good sense for UX. Working in a larger company, you tend to have each of those tasks (implementing vs designing) split out into multiple roles, making it very difficult to know what's possible to innovate, plus experience levels often differ, so newer designers may not know the limitations on a platform, so may over-design, and developers may not have experience to implement certain things, so they may limit the end result as well.
jessegrosjean 4y ago
Please see footnote in linked article. Like all ideas it's probably been invented many times before. But also like all ideas you need to invent, make good implementation, and then hopefully luck into people finding out a about it.
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  Of course, but it doesn't seem that any currently available text editor has this. Even the one mentioned in the Stack Overflow post is now gone, it seems. Still, this looks amazing - thank you for implementing it. Would love to see this formatting UI used in more apps going forward.

cush 4y ago

I want these features on every text caret everywhere. Love the typing affinity tail!

cycomanic 4y ago

That sounds an awful lot like what emacs is doing in org mode (if you configure it too). I have to say, it's often nice, but sometime still gets in the way of editing in my experience. So I'm often conflicted if I want this or pure editing of the org without the rendering.

matthberg 4y ago
I was just going to comment about how bringing features like this to org would be great. Do you know if there's a way to have caret affinity displayed in org, or equivalents for the other features mentioned? Sorry if they're obvious features, I'm a bit rusty on the latest developments.
jessegrosjean 4y ago
I'd like to see what emacs/org mode is doing ... is there a link to documentation, of demo video somewhere?

mdmglr 4y ago

Text affinity and the command pallet is innovative. Could probably bundle this up as a Objective-C library that acts as a drop in replacement for UITextView/NSTextView. Perhaps a JS/WebComponent library for <textarea> as well. I’m sure you could extract some revenue with licensing those libraries or tech support.

keizo 4y ago

The caret tail is rad

kybernetyk 4y ago

Respect. This must have been a pain to implement. (I still have PTSD from writing a text editor for macOS).

pandatigox 4y ago
Hello! I keep asking this, but do you have any good resources for doing that? For example, any repos you would recommend studying? Thanks!
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  I've spent a lot of time reading through these codebases and found that reading very useful. - https://codemirror.net https://codemirror.net - https://prosemirror.net https://prosemirror.net - https://xi-editor.io https://xi-editor.io
jessegrosjean 4y ago
Writing the text editor has certainly been painful and taken me a long time. This particular feature (typing affinity) isn't actually to hard and I think could be bolted on to most existing edit editors. Really you just need to take one extra bit of state... and then can calculate cursor drawing + moment based on that state and all the other state the editor normally tracks.

leobg 4y ago

Let’s hope Microsoft doesn’t read HN. Else you’re going to see that bundled with Office in no time. \s

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Heh, I'm actually finding MS Word a good source for autocorrect ideas.

tobr 4y ago

Very nice. I love these little innovations, it’s exactly the type of design ideas that makes me want to try an app. I wonder if it’s an intentional easter egg that the keyboard shortcuts in the popover spell out “bischl”… which is more than a little reminiscent of “bicycle”. (Could improve it by replacing “h” for “highlight” with “y” for “yellow”: “bisycl”.)

DecoPerson 4y ago
I was expecting them to say “..as easy as riding a bike.”
morsch 4y ago
Having it start with B I was pretty much a given, since that's how it's always been. https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/microsoft-word https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/microsoft-word
jessegrosjean 4y ago
No easter eggs in Bike yet... though I should add something someday. At the moment just trying to get features in to make it a good place to work and think.

chubs 4y ago

So many great ideas here. Brilliant UX! Congrats :)

fatboy 4y ago
Yeah a lot of love has gone into that. I like the subtle animations as the caret slides rightwards whilst typing or the "_I_" appears above it when he sets it to italic.

mdp2021 4y ago

> Those formatting characters are always visible My solution, when I coded my own word processor, was to use a single, invisible control character, '¶' ¹. So, for example, bold would be enclosed by '¶b' and '¶B', and a first-level heading would be a line starting with '¶1'. So, there exist characters in the text that are invisible but you know are there: you can insert the couple and delete it just like any other character. ¹(part of the extended character set - '¶' is easily accessible on some systems as [AltGr]+[R])

xigoi 4y ago
How is that different from HTML tags?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > How is that different Two chars - fixed amount. One control, one command. Just cleaner, simple and functional. It's something you type, and it is hidden, you want it to be short and clear. «How is that different», more literally: it is markup, like in htMl, but it is a special markup for that other special purpose of direct rich text tagging in word processors, not for hypertext (HTml). I called it differently, but if you so fancy, it is DRTTIWPML.

schipplock 4y ago

The video, demonstrating the features of the rich text editor, is well done. Now I want to try this Bike app (unfortunately I have no mac). I hope more developers will copy this whenever they are implementing a rich text editor.

a3w 4y ago
For me, it was too long and verbose: instead of showing with no prior knowledge, it starts telling me how intuitive stuff will be. Also the sound started activated and by clicking, as instructed by the blinking text, I disabled it, which was confusing.

samwillis 4y ago

The "affinity cursor" is a really lovely innovation. Most HTML/DOM/contenteditable based rich text editors end up adding support for virtual cursors that enable you to have the insertion cursor somewhere that the native browser cursor hasn't got support for (next to a floating image, end of a table row). Effectively this is what this is doing. Internally the inline formatting will be marked as tags in a rage, exactly like html. Essentially there is a possible cursor position both inside and outside a formatting tag, but both appear as the same visual location on the screen. This is such a lovely way to indicate the difference. So with this code: Something bold There are two cursor positions that are visually the same place: Something ||bold ^ ^ Most editors "jump" over one of those positions to hide the implementation detail from users. This idea exposes it with a little tail on the cursor.

felixfbecker 4y ago
I really wish browsers would support this for `contenteditable` (even without the tail, just having some way to put the cursor in either position, maybe based on from what direction the cursor is coming from). Slack's message editor is `contenteditable`-based, and it means there is absolutely no way to put the cursor inside at the beginning of e.g. an inline code snippet. Despite the code snippet formatting having an outline border and some padding, meaning it should be possible to even click inside or outside the snippet unambiguously just with your mouse, Chrome will always place it in the same spot and you have to do the awkward trick of replacing the first character. This single behavior makes `contenteditable` so terrible
- samwillis 4y ago
  It is possible via JS to place the cursor in that position. The issue is the a native browser cursor navigation skips over it. It would be quite possible to implement this on a contenteditable editor. That particular bug with slack would be possible to fix with JS. The particular difference about that style is there is a little bit of padding at the start of the style. Bowsers have no understanding of clicking on that padding to select inside the the beginning of the inline style.

elygre 4y ago

How does the affinity cursor work when there are multiple formats applied? For example, “text” has three insertion points shown with the pipe character: “|||text”

samwillis 4y ago
Internally a lot of editors don't nest inline styles like that. The formatting is more like a style attribute on a tag, listing all style properties. So you still only have two positions, previous formatting to the left, new formatting to the right. I suspect that is how Bike is doing it.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
 This is correct.
laserbeam 4y ago
If I were implementing this, I would ignore the middle one. There's virtually nothing visible to the user that there is a middle one OR that is actually placed before . I feel handling this edgecase causes more UX problems than not.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
 The approach I took with my own hacky editor component was to highlight the styles that currently apply at the caret position via toggle buttons for B, I, etc. This is something word processors have been doing for decades, although I recognise it's far from a perfect solution.

practal 4y ago

Brilliant idea. I am actually just researching how to build my own structured document editor for the web, based on my parsing engine for Pyramid grammars, and I'll certainly examine how to apply this idea in my context.

IshKebab 4y ago

This is genius. Very clear explanation of what's wrong with rich text editing too. Especially frustrating in Slack. On desktop they support "Mrkdwn" (a bastardisation of Markdown) but there's no way to do custom link text with it at all! The only way is if you switch to their shitty WYSIWYG editor. In their app I think you can only use WYSIWYG, but it's full of insane flaws, like if you open a code span (backticks) and then close it but don't immediately enter some more text then there is literally no way to escape it into normal text again. You have to delete the whole code span and start again. If anyone from Slack is reading this, fix your shit!

geniium 4y ago

Simple and clean, I like it.

daretorant 4y ago

This looks awesome. I do all my writing (creative writing, outlining, todos) in Bear and really love it. But this app seems like it would make outlining more fun and intuitive. Def gonna try it! Great to see fresh, innovate apps like this that prioritize fast native experience.

nudpiedo 4y ago

I like it, specially the contextual format popup, it is sort like emacs made visual (for text format). Being a meta-shortcut I guess the more complex/options it gets, the worst.

rane 4y ago

Are there any examples out there what kind of documents people are writing with this? What's the right way to write more than one line per row? Return always just adds a new row. For instance, with Workflowy, you can hit Return+shift to add a note to row which can be as long as you want, and only the first line of it will be shown if not focused.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
I personally use it for a thinking tool... as opposed to document creating at this point. So I store notes and ideas. Process ideas. I don't author final documents. Currently there is no way to add multiple lines to a row. I "think" I would rather solve this problem by adding multiple row types (maybe heading vrs notes) and then use some sort of filtering. That's still on todo list.

chmike 4y ago

These are pretty nice ideas fixing existing problems for desktop computers. How would these work with mobile devices ? It doesn't seam compatible. Also, these are user interaction suggestions. What about the encoding ? There are plenty limitations with Markdown (the pseudo standard) on this aspect.

iot_devs 4y ago

We really need Rich Text Editing on the web. Few years ago, I was writing a tiny note taking app, and the only viable alternative was Trix.

jasonjmcghee 4y ago
There are many open source Rich Text editors. The most popular is Quill, and then there are block style like EditorJS, and those meant to be very extensible like Lexical. And many more- try searching for "Quill alternatives"

caseyf 4y ago

So nice. I use Notion daily at work and these ideas solve so many annoyances that repeat over and over

fuzzygroup 4y ago

I'm a very, very happy HogBay customer. Two comments: the product is high quality and the support is outstanding. Recommended.

robenkleene 4y ago

This is the second time in 8 days that something I submitted first made it to the front page from someone else's repost less than 24 hours later. What am I doing wrong? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480410

mritchie712 4y ago
I think a lot of getting to the front page depends on your random luck of the first 10 people that see the post. If enough of those 10 like your thing, it gets seen by thousands more and may make it to the front page. If none of those 10 do, it's fades away. It's 10 people out of millions that visit HN, so there's a lot of variability. You could post the exact same thing 15 minutes later then the first time and get a totally different "first 10" and that post could perform completely differently.
- robenkleene 4y ago
  Yeah, all good points. I guess I'm partially just confused about the dupe detector. E.g., when I post something that someone else has already submitted recently, it just redirects me to the existing post. Re the luck factor, part of the appeal of Hacker News is there seems to be a lot of work done to minimize the role of luck. Which generally felt like it worked well for me historical, just not recently. Not a big deal in any event, but if there's something I should be doing differently, I'd like to do it.
  - mritchie712 4y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately I think a huge amount still comes down to luck. HN is better then any other platform (which is incredible considering how many engineers work on it) at detecting fraud (e.g. "upvote rings"). But I think a ton still comes down to the first few people that see the post.
ilaksh 4y ago
Are we sure that there aren't some users involved in a voting ring?

maxerickson 4y ago

For puzzle one, in Microsoft Word, control+space clears direct font formatting from the cursor (or if text is selected, the selected text). So exactly a consistent way to go back to unformatted text. For puzzle two it uses some opaque heuristic to decide where to insert the text, I wouldn't really on it, I'd right click and edit the link.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Thanks, I didn't know about Control-Space on MS Word. Looking in menu's I see "Clear Formatting" menu item, but the shortcut isn't listed. How did you know about this shortcut?
- maxerickson 4y ago
  I don't remember. I spend quite a bit of time editing in Word and usually end up searching if there is something I think should be possible and don't know how to do, and I'll keep an eye out for other tidbits when reading.

account-5 4y ago

Is there a Windows / Linux alternative to this. I was excited to be reading about this prior to realising it was Mac only.

criddell 4y ago
Other than games on Windows, it seems like the Mac is the only desktop operating system with anything interesting happening on it. Workflowy is what I use. It's cross platform, but a lot clunkier than this.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Is that really true? I had a feeling that macOS desktop developers are on the decline. There are certainly a lot of Windows-only apps that are quite nice. Further, as a person trying to develop a cross-platform, desktop-only GUI framework and applications, macOS is absolutely the worst offender on nearly everything. From only supporting an outdated OpenGL version to requiring that windows are managed on the main thread. Neither Windows nor Linux have either of these limitations.

mistercow 4y ago

I love all of these features. The link part is a little rough. I think this is the best choice out of a space or bad options, but it sucks that it means that the thing a link does 99% of the time has to be flipped on its head. I don’t see a good alternative though; if you make it an “edit” button instead of a “visit” button, you make normal text editing super inconvenient, and that’s the effect users will usually want in an editor.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
I agree it's not perfect. In particular it's a little weird to highlight the link text blue since it's not what you interact with. Mostly just makes it easy to see and then find the link button, also useful if you are planning to publish a document so that you can see where the links will be in published document. One feature that I do like about this design is it's pretty generic. For example in the future I could imagine detecting dates and then insert a button after the detected date to interact with calendar. I think the general idea of inserting simple interaction button in text can be quite useful.

sgallant 4y ago

Happy to see this here! I'm a long time fan of Jesse's work [1] and love seeing independent software developers ship their own products. 1. https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/about/ https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/about/

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Thanks :)

leephillips 4y ago

“Those formatting characters are always visible. They make my text look messy.” This problem was solved in Vi with highlighting and concealing: the formatting characters are hidden and the target formatting is approximated until you move the cursor to edit the formatted bit. I’m sure Emacs has an equivalent.

codethief 4y ago

This looks really nice. If only it weren't Mac-only. :(

nbzso 4y ago

Affinity cursor and formatting tooltips are cool. Sadly, only for macOS. I am a long time Apple user, but knowing Apple's direction, cannot invest in software made only for macOS. Obsidian gives me everything I need, and mostly a multiplatform confidence.

canadiantim 4y ago

Is there any hope of turning this editor into a web-embeddable rich test editor like eg tiptap? Would love that and would gladly pay for it.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Sorry, I'm tried web tech in previous apps. This time I wanted build native, and I don't have resources to do it all. What I would love... Take a look at Bike's file format, it's just a subset of HTML. Would love to someone to write a web based editor for Bike's file format. Then you could edit Bike files anywhere you want... and also have cool native experience on Mac. Also note that Bike does read/write .txt and .opml.

jessegrosjean 4y ago

I'm Bike's developer. Thanks everyone for the comments. While I have the eyeballs I hope you don't mind me asking... I'm in process of adding autocomplete to Bike. Problem is that I generally find macOS autocomplete painful and unpredictable. I both disable it and have many typos. I'm not talking so much about the suggestions, but about the surrounding UI. I'm looking for ideas/links for how to make autocomplete better and more predictable. I know Mac apps, I do know much else. What are your favorite autocomplete implementations past or present? If you could have a "fixed" macOS autocompletion what would it look like?

heresie-dabord 4y ago
> I know Mac apps, I do know much else. Possible autocomplete-related grammar error? ^_^ I'm not a user of Apple products, but in the Linux world there are code editors that enable the user to define custom completions. I find this to be an excellent productivity feature, not just for coding. The editor Geany calls them snippets.
- jessegrosjean 4y ago
  Thanks. I agree the way that programmer text editor handles snippets is nice. I think this is a pretty good and clear UI already. For autocorrect I'm talking about corrections that are less predictable such as spelling or grammar errors. They can be very useful because they mean fixes happen without any extra work, and mean you don't see lots of red spelling errors in your document... but it's also a case where computer is doing automatic work that sometimes might be wrong. So needs good way to indicate that correction has happened and easy way to revert.
recuter 4y ago
Couple weeks ago the guy who implemented autocomplete on iOS went on a bit of a rant. Doesn't translate directly to macOS but useful reading: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 And just in case you or somebody isn't familiar, read this classic: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html I suggest to try and keep it simple.

padjo 4y ago

The affinity cursor is a really smart solution to such an old and common problem. Bravo! I hope more editors adopt it as a standard pattern.

airbreather 4y ago

How about we have an informal rule that if is Mac only, or Win10 only, etc that it says so in the title?

Narishma 4y ago
Or Linux only for that matter.
dev_tty01 4y ago
Well, historically there is a lot of software discussed that is Linux or Win only and nobody bothered to mention that there was no Mac version... As a long time Mac user, I think a little movement in the other direction is only fair. :-)

sumitgt 4y ago

Brilliant work! Wish I was a Mac user. For the hyperlinks, it seems editing the text and visiting the link is easy. But there isn’t a way to edit the hyperlink itself quickly? Have you considered using affinity cursor along the up/down for that as well? Eg. Up updates the hyperlink content while default/down updates the link text. Not sure how it would work out UX wise. Maybe opens up a popover with cursor for the hyperlink.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
> But there isn’t a way to edit the hyperlink itself quickly? Correct. For that you need to use Formatting pallet (also in video). I did initially build it so clicking link would open a pallet with option to follow link or edit link (Pages.app) does that. But in the end felt better to make following link fast and add/edit links slower. Up/Down could work, but I think it would break text editing movement/consistency more than I would want. For example if you were down arrowing to navigate you document and then randomly hit a link it would be frustrating to see link editor instead of keep moving down.

replwoacause 4y ago

So many great ideas, loved the video, keep up the excellent work!

voidz 4y ago

Fantastic innovations. But where's the underline? :)

jessegrosjean 4y ago
For links or for just general formatting? For links I just decided to leave out. Seemed blue was enough, and especially since link interaction in Bike only happens through link button. For general formatting I left out because underline formatting seems to be falling out of favor as a standard and when I asked in my forum most users said they didn't need it. Eventually I would like to read/write Markdown from Bike and underline isn't a part of standard Markdown.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  Lots of browsers format links with just a thin underline and no color change. I actually prefer that approach since it avoids the visual color clutter. Would be nice to have an option to do that instead of color. Lots of great ideas, especially the format affinity indication/control. Is that just arrow key or arrow with cmd key? If it is only the arrow key, how do you distinguish user intent to actually move the cursor vs change the affinity?
  - jessegrosjean 4y ago
    Eventually I hope to add theme support so that links can look how you want, but that's not a feature that I'll be working on super soon. The affinity is just treated as a new character position. When caret moves through that position is doesn't "move", but instead draws tail differently. So it's just normal arrow key with one extra state to move through. That extra state only happens at formatting boundaries, so generally the cost isn't too much.

wslh 4y ago

Rich text posts in HN constantly recalled this personal story that I am waiting to happen (e.g. be developed by someone else). Since the use of an early Palm Pilot [1] I wanted to have a personal wiki. It was a little awkward in that moment comparing to something like a Squeak Wiki [2]. So when the iPhone 1 appeared [3] there was another call. The first versions of iOS didn't include text selection and copy and paste to generate links to new pages. In this context I did a basic reverse engineer of the UITextView and could advance this towards the "wiki dream" but it would never be accepted in the Apple Store so I abandoned the idea that was basically without a business perspective. As tptacek [4] said recently: "For several years I just use Apple's Notes.app. It's honestly pretty great; it's frustratingly good..." [5]. I would add: but it will be more great if they add native hyperlinks within the internal notes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiki [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535683

donatj 4y ago

I was a little sad when I figured out this was part of an app and not a rich text editor I could use in my projects.

mshockwave 4y ago

This is a neat solution! Though I wonder if this can carry over to terminal environments

amjd 4y ago

Discovered this on HN a few months ago, and it has become indispensable for me. Beautiful software with subtle, nifty innovations in UX. I love that Jesse is taking a first principles approach with this and not constraining himself with the standard text editor patterns. He's also pretty active on the support forum and very receptive to feedback.

d4rkp4ttern 4y ago

Any plans to support Math(Jax) or other latex-like math notation ?

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Unlikely in the near term. I feel like there are many other features that I need to do first. Longer term maybe?
- d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  Definitely like what you have now in terms of a text editor! But thanks for letting me know about math.

firexcy 4y ago

There're some other editors that have similar behaviors. AFAIK, CKEditor [1], an online rich text editing framework, is optimized for cascaded formatting tags. A <pre> or <a> element will be highlighted if the cursor is "within" its context, and when your cursor is at the edge of such an element, you can press the arrow key again to move into/out from it. [1] https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/demo https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/demo

allenu 4y ago

I really enjoy seeing how you demo the features of Bike. The design is really thought out and you do a great job of communicating how it works in simple terms. (I'm an indie Mac/iOS dev myself, so I'm going to take pointers on how you present your innovations!)

jessegrosjean 4y ago
I find AppleScript very useful for this. I script the text input, menu items, and timings like this: menuItem("Format:Bold", 0.2) type("Efficient") press("⏎")
- allenu 4y ago
  Good suggestion. I always forget AppleScript exists.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ghusbands 4y ago

The cursor affinity could be entirely subsumed by the visible typing attributes, which might be more intuitive. For both, I'd worry about the user's cursor configuration affecting things - it could be safer and more widely compatible to have it float nearby rather than have it attached to the cursor. The link editing doesn't seem like an improvement on other rich text interfaces, with no visually obvious way to edit the link destination. A keyboard shortcut that tells you other keyboard shortcuts isn't at all innovative, but it is handy and more software should have it.

bonney_io 4y ago

It always makes me smile to see Hog Bay Software releases get such positive attention. Jesse Grosjean is one of the only indie developers of note that I am aware that are based in Maine. Makes myself, the aspiring iOS developer, not feel so alone in this state. :) What Jesse is doing here for rich text editing is astounding, to me, and is exactly the type of advancement that the popular word processing apps should take note of.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Go Maine! Where are you based? Got any app links? And excuse me if I should already know your handle, I have a terrible memory.

zestyping 4y ago

Bike is beautiful! I'm tempted. But all my notes are in Notational Velocity (https://notational.net/ https://notational.net/) at the moment, because the largest source of friction for me is finding note files. In Notational Velocity I never have to open a file dialog; file dialogs on Mac OS are still shockingly slow, and even if they were fast it would take too long to find the file I want. My hands never leave the keyboard; I just type a few characters and Notational Velocity finds the correct note for me. Do you have any interest in adding an instant search feature, like Notational Velocity? I'd replace it if I could keep the fast search while being able to outline and edit with Bike's fantastic rich text capability.

jessegrosjean 4y ago
Eventually yes, but not anytime soon. Right now Bike is very much a text editor, while notational velocity is more database of text files. At some point I hope to add a "workspace" aspect to Bike where you can open a directory of Bike files, but this is a long way off. For now the focus will just be to improve the text editor aspect of Bike.