I’m not a tech guy, just curious are this kind of editor hard to develop? It seems like pretty old tech and many markdown editors are nailed. (saw in roadmap as long-term project)
Just conjecture: my guess is that it isn’t so much that doing any WYSIWYG editor is hard—it’s that designing one that fits Obsidian effectively is non-trivial.
This may be a good place for Pareto’s principle. An 80%-polished editor is likely pretty easy. Developing the last 20% of fit and finish to suit Obsidian’s unique features and style is probably the hard part.
Could this be implemented by mixing markdown-source-view and markdown-preview-view so the active line is displayed with markdown-source-view and all other lines are displayed with markdown-preview-view? I think this could be accomplished by mixing the two in the structure and applying display: none to the version that is currently not in use (for all lines, markdown-source-view would be set to not display, except for the active line).
This would be partial WYSIWYG - all lines in the document would be rendered as preview except for the line we are currently working on which would be rendered as source. But as I recall from a poll on the discord server, this is the version of WYSIWYG most people were interested in.
long-term in Obsidian doesn’t seem likely to be long-term as usually expected.
I’d regard a half-baked wysiwyg as a mistake, even with the intention to improve later. Developers have already intimated they’d like it to be something like Typora and it’s best to avoid a reputation for less than that.
@death.au had this idea at one point. Personally I think it’s too hacky, there’s lots of things under the hood that probably won’t work in a solution like this, e.g. selection, undo/redo history, etc.
Also like you said it’s partial – for example I don’t think people expect all inline LaTeX to get expanded to source when you start editing a paragraph. The polish of something like that wouldn’t match the rest of Obsidian, unfortunately, so we don’t plan to do something half-baked.
While I am looking forward to a WYSIWYG mode, I appreciate the devs approach of taking time to get it right. There are too many bad open source markdown editors because it is easy to hack something together. Obsidian is a writing and reading tool, so this part should be given real effort IMHO - people will spend countless hours in it. Designing WYSIWYG ‘from scratch’ will also hopefully allow much tighter plugin api integration.
Just for the record, Silver did a poll in early May, I only just found out about it and voted for an option.
Could this be implemented by mixing
markdown-source-viewandmarkdown-preview-viewso the active line is displayed withmarkdown-source-viewand all other lines are displayed withmarkdown-preview-view? I think this could be accomplished by mixing the two in the structure and applyingdisplay: noneto the version that is currently not in use (for all lines,markdown-source-viewwould be set to not display, except for the active line).
I’d say the active paragraph should be shown in markdown, as it will provide more context while editing. Or a simple WYSIWYG editor a la Trilium Notes is enough i.e. the ability to edit the text while previewing it. One can always revert to the MD editor if he wants.