[Community Feedback] Using a What-you-see-is-what-you-get markdown editor or not

[delvh]

Hello everyone,

Historically, Gitea always had a Markdown editor that immediately previewed how the result would look like:

However, all existing editors we have experimented with turned out to have various unfixable bugs and were fundamentally flawed, worst of all regarding accessibility and that the end result can differ from what the editor displays.

As such, we have already deprecated our existing editor (EasyMDE) in 1.20.0. Instead, you only see the text you entered:

Now, we are considering whether to drop the editor highlighting completely.

[!WARNING] If you rely on the immediate preview how your comment will look like, please let your voice be heard in this issue. If there is no huge demand, we will drop immediate Markdown highlighting in 1.23.0.

[!IMPORTANT] You can still see how a text will be rendered by clicking on the Preview tab in every editor:

[!IMPORTANT] Anything that is already present on the server (markdown files, issue comments, PR descriptions, PR reviews, …) is unaffected and will still render as Markdown. Only the preview how your comments etc. will look like will be less immediate as you must first navigate to Preview.

[stuzer05]

What are current problems with preview tab? We use it. At least, if not features are supported, they can be disabled for preview. But it's essential for formatting an issue

[eeyrjmr]

What are current problems with preview tab? We use it. At least, if not features are supported, they can be disabled for preview.

No issue with preview tab Issue with the editor (Write) tab "trying" to do some form of previewing.

[KazzmanK]

Never noticed that editor tab was trying to beautify text in any form. Crafting tables is a bit annoying, but my colleagues never complained about lack of wysiwyg

[Crown0815]

From my perspective, a WYSIWYG editor is nice to have, but not essential in any way due to the preview. Github also has none.

[Pontiac76]

If yanking the ability to see in real time what the font-face of the text is going to be affects the security of the system, it shouldn't exist.

I love my WYSIWYG, and if it's removed, I'd be absolutely happy to write my own external WYSIWYG2MU (* to markup) for different markup sites. Gives me something to do.

[Pontiac76]

That said... would be kind of nice to have a real time optional side view of the content instead of having to switch tabs... even in a popup window or something for those lucky enough to have the screen real estate (I have 5 monitors, and sometimes I STILL run out of real estate!)

[wxiaoguang]

I have a feeling that there are enough end users who still like the visual feedback by a "smart" markdown editor. Maybe some modern editors could replace the unmaintained EasyMDE.

For example, some editors:

• https://github.com/Milkdown/milkdown
• https://github.com/jefago/tiny-markdown-editor
• https://github.com/nhn/tui.editor
• https://github.com/mdx-editor/editor

[xxfogs]

There are some non-technical people using my Gitea deployment and a WYSIWYG is particularly helpful for them as they're not too good at remembering markdown.

Preview works flawlessly but they still prefer seeing formatting immediately.

[julmb]

I'd rather have a clean plain text editing experience and an accurate preview than a WYSIWYG editor that does a mediocre job at both of these.

However, it would be really nice if there was a keyboard shortcut to switch between editing and preview. Or is that already a thing?

[amrsoll]

It is nice to have a WYSIWYG for non-technical users who need to interact with developers through Gitea, especially with tables and images. The communication barrier would be lowered.

[GiteaBot]

We close issues that need feedback from the author if there were no new comments for a month. :tea: