GoKawiilHi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own.
The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it dozens of times on the same page.
Markdown in a plain <textarea> was the best alternative to a full WYSIWYG, but its main drawback is how ugly it looks without any formatting. I can handle it, but my clients certainly can't.
I went down the ContentEditable rabbit hole for a few years, but always came to realize others had solved it better than I ever could.
I kept coming back to this problem: why can't I have a simple, performant, beautiful markdown editor? The best solution I ever saw was Ghost's split-screen editor: markdown on the left, preview on the right, with synchronized scrolling.
Then, about a year ago, an idea popped into my head: what if we layered a preview pane behind a <textarea>? If we aligned them perfectly, then even though you were only editing plain text, it would look and feel like you were editing rich text!
Of course, there would be downsides: you'd have to use a monospace font, all content would have to have the same font size, and all the markdown markup would have to be displayed in the final preview.
But those were tradeoffs I could live with.
Anyways, version 1 didn't go so well... it turns out it's harder to keep a textarea and a rendered preview in alignment than I thought. Here's what I discovered:
- Lists were hard to align - bullet points threw off character alignment. Solved with HTML entities (• for bullets) that maintain monospace width
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