At this point one should question why it is pain in the ass, not how often does one edit it because it is. Browsers could easily show Notes.app-like editing window for a long urls. There is no reason to force it to be a one-liner, except that it is historical.
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.
We've been working on an open source solution for this, if you're interested - markdown or wysiwygy based editing with a hosted option – http://getoutline.com/
I sympathize with anybody who attempts to write an editor that runs in a browser.
If you're going to even entertain the thought of writing an editor I recommend reading Piotrek Koszulinski's article on Medium [1]. There are many pitfalls when writing an editor and the sooner you know of them the better.
On the plus side a new spec for a more low-level version of contentEditable is currently being worked on.[2] It's a complicated undertaking but the task force is making progress. There is participation from all major browser vendors so we have reasons to be optimistic: we may make it out of the Dark Ages of web-based rich editing one day.
There is something about the rich text editor in the web interface that makes it uneditable on iphones/ipads. This is a shame because I wanted to write a long post on the train and format it the way I like. Yes, the straight HTML editor works, but coding on an iP* is tedious and horrible. You may also get a lot more mobile and "couch bloggers" if you can do rich text editing this way as well. My $0.02.
OP! Nice of you to ship this. We need more of editors and self publishing platforms.
I tried creating an editor a few years ago at my last job [1]. It is really hard to get all things correct when implementing your editor, with all quirks that contendeditable has.
Hmmm... This kind of editing is great for trivial examples or when inputting text through tablet/phone and it beats WYSIWYG editors hands down, but for any serious work I still prefer WYMeditor: http://www.wymeditor.org/ (don't be fooled by apparent inactivity - they just don't update the page very often).
I'll pipe up here. I've found it gets buggy once you move beyond basic editing. E.g. regular expression search or search/replace. I've run into several other things.
Overall, I'm left with the impression that it's "a mile wide and a foot deep".
I had this instinct as well but I think this is about rendering, not necessarily editing. The document link is not to something editable. Granted, perhaps these will merge.
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