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As a developer who built my own note app (like an anemic Notion), using pell.js as a backbone, I tend to disagree that it does nothing to help. I'll grant you t

As a developer who built my own note app (like an anemic Notion), using pell.js as a backbone, I tend to disagree that it does nothing to help. I'll grant you that it is so lightweight as to not provide much luxury, but I find that far more useful than the 'kitchen sink' approach most libraries take. I don't need anyone to coddle me, I need someone to expose functionality to me in a way that works best for my intentions and architecture. pell.js wraps up inputs and delivers me formatted content. That's all I need it to do in order to take input from multiple users and provide that formatted content to the data store and other users. I was able to customize all the layouts I needed with the actions extensions that the library provides for. The lightweight, event-based functionality made my render stack the only slowdown for nesting new pell.js instances inside layout blocks so that I could use the top level instance to insert an inline image and a new pell.js span, and then that span's instance to format whatever blocks of content I wanted beside the image. I was honestly pretty surprised by how easily the utility just worked. Not sure what all you are trying to do that template literals and a simple input formatter can't do, but if you elaborate on an example or something maybe I can see where the library's failures are?

jitl 3y ago
> Not sure what all you are trying to do I work on non-anemic Notion and built the current @-mention menu and overhauled the text editor system to enable cross-block text selection. The criteria I use to evaluate a rich text editor component are: - How does collaboration work? Does the framework give me enough for OT or CRDT bindings? - Does it use a tree-like data structure or do you need to add this later? - Can you easily build interactions like @-mention menu or tab completion like VS Code? - Does the editor tolerate concurrent state updates without breaking Input Method Editor composition, ie a remote user comments on text while the current user is inputting a Chinese character? - Do demos of the above features work on Android? In Chinese? From reading the Pell source I didn’t see much that would help with my criteria.
- catapart 3y ago
  You seem a little confused by my initial comment. What you seem to be saying, here, is that pell.js isn't a good rich text editor. What I said was that pell can be used to write a good rich text editor. If I were building a rich text editor, why would I want my input mechanism to build my tree or replicatable data bindings for me? And it's not like pell stands in the way of those things. It's a glorified text type input. I'm just going to chalk this one up to a misunderstanding and hope you have a good day!

jitl 3y ago

> Not sure what all you are trying to do I work on non-anemic Notion and built the current @-mention menu and overhauled the text editor system to enable cross-block text selection. The criteria I use to evaluate a rich text editor component are: - How does collaboration work? Does the framework give me enough for OT or CRDT bindings? - Does it use a tree-like data structure or do you need to add this later? - Can you easily build interactions like @-mention menu or tab completion like VS Code? - Does the editor tolerate concurrent state updates without breaking Input Method Editor composition, ie a remote user comments on text while the current user is inputting a Chinese character? - Do demos of the above features work on Android? In Chinese? From reading the Pell source I didn’t see much that would help with my criteria.

catapart 3y ago
You seem a little confused by my initial comment. What you seem to be saying, here, is that pell.js isn't a good rich text editor. What I said was that pell can be used to write a good rich text editor. If I were building a rich text editor, why would I want my input mechanism to build my tree or replicatable data bindings for me? And it's not like pell stands in the way of those things. It's a glorified text type input. I'm just going to chalk this one up to a misunderstanding and hope you have a good day!