Text Selection issue

[DanielEdrisian]

Hey @colbyn

Nice project! Trying to use it right now but the text selection has a bug. It forgets to clear the previous cursor position when dragging, so each time you drag, it has the same end position.

Lmk if you want a sponsorship support to continue building this! It's very promising.

(Feel free to email me daniel@alexcodes.app)

Thanks,
Daniel

[colbyn]

Hello @DanielEdrisian

I apologize for the late response, and I greatly appreciate your feedback.

I will be replying back via email by Monday or Tuesday, but here is my public reply which includes the status of this project for all others who may be interested. You may skip what follows, in my private reply I can be more open about some ideas I'm currently working on that may interest you (given your work).

I’ve just finished a major subproject, and I’m now considering my next move, on my list of TODOs for my current work is better markdown rendering with full text selection and highlighting support (especially to accommodate document searching bottom-up as opposed to the top-down default in all web-apps, akin to iTerm's text search behavior, among many other nice-to-haves). I’ve learned much since I began this prototype and I’m considering a fresh rewrite, with an eye towards a production ready implementation this time.

With regard to,

“It forgets to clear the previous cursor position when dragging, so each time you drag, it has the same end position.”

Without going into the details, I believe that problem you're referring to was a quick fix to overcome some TextKit2 specific problems. Overall, this markdown rendering prototype still has a few problems, and there are some typesetting improvements I'd like to make for more beautiful text, and as I mentioned, I’m considering a fresh rewrite.

However, I need to start managing my time more effectively and I can’t just begin arbitrary projects (especially one of this caliber) without strong justification in terms of my long term goals (which right now is just making money). To this end, I’m considering spending the next week doing an assessment of all my options as far as markdown rendering (and potentially rich text editing) is concerned. Notably, there are no good native markdown renderers available right now (except perhaps my project which is a proof of concept). But a little while ago I was talking to Dave DeLong (you may know him, he’s a major community leader in a local user group that you presented at last year — I was unfortunately kinda spaced out) who mentioned that it’s possible to layout embedded web views in such a manner that may render the initial justification for this project unnecessary.

Moreover, a markdown rendering engine with full text selection capabilities and miscellaneous features is overall, very complex. I feel as though I may as well consider my browser based options before I dive back into such a potentially time consuming project.


However, if a drop-in replacement for UITextView but for markdown rendering is important for your work, I could certainly use some quick cash short term if you’re willing to sponsor its development into a full production ready implementation. Which I would greatly prefer over a browser based solution due to the limitations of the latter, especially to overcome browser limitations concerning text selection and highlighting in particular, and aesthetically I very much enjoyed the classic typeset feel of my prototype implementation (although it could certainly be better, but this prototype is based on tech that predates web browsers) but with modern responsive layout and text fragment animations.

PS

Coincidently, ChatGPT's iOS app has greatly improved in a few respects since I released this work. Open source is dead if corporate employees just steal your hard solved problems. I may make the future production ready implementation closed source and available only to patrons.

[07akioni]

I've also noticed that ChatGPT's iOS app has supported a fully selectable table, which makes me curious about how do they achieve this. After some investigation, I found that it may be impossible to using TextKit 1 to solve the problem. So I just google "textkit2 + table", then I found the project.

[colbyn]

ChatGPT's iOS app has supported a fully selectable table

Oh nice. Last I tried, text selection isn't as uniform as I'd like in ChatGPT's iOS app. For instance, there's no way to extend selections across certain distinct blocks, especially across horizontally scrollable blocks. I have a strategy in mind that should perfectly implement the designed functionality I have in mind: uniform text selection/highlighting with horizontally scrollable groups for tables and code blocks (and in a manner that "just works" concerning text selections), all of which I plan to accommodate in a cleaned up rewrite.

Also, to be clear, my implementation is based on TextKit2 specifically, which gives me better control for rendering vector graphics underneath the text based on typesetting information.

Overall I like TextKit2, although being able to support magazine style columned content as effortlessly as you would with TextKit1 would be great (something I'd love to experiment with).

Also, @07akioni since you're interested in my work. I can't make up my mind as to whether or not the next version should be open source. Suppose you were in my shoes designing and implementing a system that few have any experience with and where most folks won’t bother supporting the work if it can be avoided. If you were in my shoes, would you advise open sourcing the new implementation that really goes the extra mile compared to the current open source prototype? My current thinking is that open source brings publicity, so should I go down this route, I could always have a more ‘featureful’ commercial offering. Such as one with edibility support (will probably require a custom lossless markdown AST and parser) or LaTeX math rendering support... But overall, I can't make up my mind.