Request to add raw markdown writing view

[wohenbushuang]

Request new feature to switch the editor view modes, such as raw markdown, splited double columns for synchronized scroll preview, and WYSIWYW as now. Similar products: Hedgedoc, Github markdown editor, etc.

Reason

For now, it's quite hard to do some writing jobs on the rendered texts. For example:

• append to link text
• prepend to bold text

Providing a pure markdown code editor somewhere will enhance the ability for delicate operation.

Furthermore, it will be easier to add Latex and diagrams support in the future.

[tommoor]

Hi @wohenbushuang – honestly we won't be supporting a raw markdown editor in this project, we're doubling down on making the editor collaborative and introducing features like mentions, inline comments, rich embeds and other things that just aren't compatible with the limited markdown spec.

I think your frustrations around editing the edges of marks could be addressed without this change however.

[senpro-ingwersenk]

In this case: How much "Markdown" is outline then, if you can not edit in raw Markdown?

I started work at a new company and we run Outline as a documentation basis. Thing is, there are weird behaviours with headings and alike, which would be very easily verifiable if I could view the source. And the source would technically be raw markdown.

And this is what confuses me; Outline is said to be a markdown wiki system, but does not show raw markdown to fix the generated markdown?

Thanks for your hard work! ^^

[wohenbushuang]

@tommoor First of all, I've updated to v0.65.1. Outline is now my daily notebook application, and I can easily share certain page to friends, or a scoped structal document to dev coworkers! 😄

However, until now I can still find the editing experience weird sometimes. Below is one example I met today. Besides, in daily usage, there exists other bad experience cases. These were hard to screen recorded, video clipped and annotated for new issues due to the time cost, while also hard to describe the reproduction procedures and phenomenons in words.

I have to say that raw markdown editor is user friendly from some aspects, since the styling is also being controled within raw code textarea, as well as editing and rendering are saperated. All editing actions could be done on the raw code, regardless the rendered result of the previous step, and won't be interruptted by block rearrangements.

But for a WYSIWYW, these days I realized that the troubles I suffered are result from outline hides the menu toolbar. The styling functions are now only available with markdown syntax, but it will be rendered and disappeared once I completed; or by the hovering toolbar, which has limited options. ProseMirror and other WYSIWYW editors will have a menu toolbar or context menu support containing all styling function options, and user can easily find their need/see styling status, then click them (eg., cancel enumeration in the above example) whenever they want. I think that the hovering toolbar is also useful and convenient (maybe inspired from MS Word 2013+ ?), but it is for a shortcut. You cannot put every styling functions into it due to the limited room (BTW, the editing experience on mobile screen is awful). So, can you imagine the difficulty to use MS Word without menu toolbar and context menu?

In a word, I recommend to add the menu toolbar back, maybe globally fixed top or bottom would be nice.

[socketpair]

We have two categories of people:

1. programmers - it's much faster for them to write markdown text instead of WYSIWYG
2. Managers - it's much faster for them to use WYSIWYG
3. Technical writers - it's much easier for them to cleanup text after managers

PLEASE add raw markdown editing.

[threema-lenny]

Being part of the programmers category, I have no issues stripping weird additions to Markdown due to proprietary features if we can get source editing. I also have no issues with this being an experimental function if we can get source editing. But, my god, is WYSIWYG driving me nuts.

I must say, this product is advertising with "Markdown compatibility" and no source editing is, at the very least, misleading to me.

[tommoor]

I have no issues stripping weird additions to Markdown due to proprietary features if we can get source editing

I'm not sure what you mean here. The problem is that markdown cannot represent much of what a modern collaborative editor needs to achieve – embeds, resizable table columns, comments, multiplayer editing, the list goes on… this is why I don't think it's possible for the platform to support both 🤔

But hey, if someone has a fantastic solution I'm open to ideas

[threema-lenny]

It probably depends on the underlying storage format you've chosen that achieves these features which I haven't looked at so far.

If this is an extended markdown with, for example, some proprietary inline HTML-ish extensions that are parsed by the WYSIWYG engine to achieve things such as comments, sized tables, etc., then I wouldn't mind editing that source because I could strip those extensions or leave them as-is. And I could totally live without collaborative editing in source editing mode. Sure, it does sound like a hack (because it kinda is) but I'm truly that desperate if the source is still editable within reason.

If it isn't some kind of extended markdown underneath for storage, then it's probably not even possible.

[wohenbushuang]

We programmers need a panel to edit the source to deal with some (many, actually) strange bugs before the editor is strong enough. It can be like the dev tool in Chrome, hiden by default and used by professional users.

[socketpair]

Look at GitHub itself. It allows to edit Markdown directly. Sometimes WYSIWYG editor does strange things, and it's not always easy to fix them. So, please, again, add text area with raw markdown.

[socketpair]

@tommoor Please take a look at the issue. It's a very useful thing for us.