Roam is great for entering text, but as soon as I have to move on to the editing phase, the frustrations with how the WYSIWYG editor works quickly reveal themselves.
I usually encounter this while processing book highlights. Here's an exaggerated example:
There are a couple of things wrong here:
selecting text requires surgical precision: trying to select text in the edited block while moving the mouse outside the text block will result in random selection of the adjacent block and/or with the selection disappearing (the expected behavior would be the same as in a text field: moving the mouse outside the block, should select all lines between the caret and the mouse cursor)
selecting text using the arrow keys will also result in selecting adjacent blocks, if I'm not being careful
this means that it's easy to randomly exit the editing mode (when adjacent blocks are selected)
usually I have to select text multiple times because my selection disappears
More issues I've noticed:
CMD+H shortcut for highlights randomly hides the browser window, even if the focus is on edited block
moving the caret between adjacent blocks with up & down arrow keys will sometimes cause the browser window to scroll up and down, depending how much the edited field expands because of the additional Markdown text (e.g. external links) - and when this happens it takes a while to scan the page to find the part I want to edit
when pasting two (or more) paragraphs, the caret will be inserted after the first paragraph, not at the end of the pasted text
browser window has no scrollbar on the right, so it's hard to tell how much is left to scroll through
Another one (switching to editing mode results in unintended selection):
These are all tiny problems that break the flow of editing.
Feature implementation
I know there's no easy way to approach this, so I'm just leaving it here as something to consider.
All of these issues stem from the combination of WYSIWYG & Markdown mode, with the currently edited block being treated as plain text and adjacent blocks as rendered html.
One way to deal with that could be to introduce separate markdown & wysiwyg modes for the whole page, rather than distinguishing between these modes on a per-block basis. This would allow to treat the whole page as a single block of text with more predictable editing (selection, copy & paste, formatting).
Describe the problem
Roam is great for entering text, but as soon as I have to move on to the editing phase, the frustrations with how the WYSIWYG editor works quickly reveal themselves.
I usually encounter this while processing book highlights. Here's an exaggerated example:
There are a couple of things wrong here:
More issues I've noticed:
Another one (switching to editing mode results in unintended selection):
These are all tiny problems that break the flow of editing.
Feature implementation
I know there's no easy way to approach this, so I'm just leaving it here as something to consider.
All of these issues stem from the combination of WYSIWYG & Markdown mode, with the currently edited block being treated as plain text and adjacent blocks as rendered html.
One way to deal with that could be to introduce separate markdown & wysiwyg modes for the whole page, rather than distinguishing between these modes on a per-block basis. This would allow to treat the whole page as a single block of text with more predictable editing (selection, copy & paste, formatting).
Additional context
I'm on macOS Catalina and Chrome 86.