visual-editor VS xi-editor

A few words about Visual Editor. This editor is built around the powerful Quilljs Delta document format originally developed by QuillJs. Delta documents can be easily converted to JSON, the encoding is easy to read and modify and offers many extensibility options.

There's a fork of flutter_quill called visual-editor. It switches to the next widget in the focus sequence, which is one way to properly handle the key.

Flutter also isn't great for text editors, but there are a few implementations like visual-editor for formatted text that's acceptable. Also, the xterm package is pretty amazing from its capabilities (even runs full vim!).

There's visual-editor, but that one has a different focus than a programming editor.

Two months ago I decided to fork the Quill rich text editor because the architecture is extremely difficult to follow. Since I desperately need for my own project, a strong rich text editor that can be easily extended with more features I took the decision to byte the bullet and refactor Quill from the ground up. There are numerous extremely good features in Quill yet the overall architecture was a total train wreck. In this article I'll be explaining in detail what were the issues and how I attempted to improve them. You can find the source code at Visual Editor Github. I've documented the entire process and I'll be releasing deep dive Flutter architecture episodes at Visual Coding YouTube. Enough shameless plugs, let's get going.

You are right, we have programmed the app with Flutter and are very happy with the framework. Two years ago, when we started, many libraries were still missing in the community, especially the text editors were problematic. That's why I contributed a lot to the community to improve the status. At the moment I am very excited about the libraries SuperEditor and VisualEditor. Otherwise, the tooling with Flutter is excellent and it's a lot of fun to program with it. We programmed the server with NestJS, use a PostgreSQL database and GraphQL as the query language.

Visual Editor Gihub Repo - Freshly forked, already many changes, to be published in pub dev.

Was confused until I realised I'd confused Zed, with Xi[1] which is also rust based, and which incidentally has a frontend called "Xim"..

Also there's a wiki-editor (like Tomboy[2]) called "Zim"[3].

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

Project site linked from the GitHub[0] is https://xi-editor.io. Linked doc is a mirror of this[1], which was afaik originally written by Raph Linus.

[0]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

[1]: https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_01.html

> thing that gets deleted when you hit backspace

Is there a canonical source for this part, by the way? Xi copied the logic from Android[1] (as per the issue you linked downthread), and I vaguely remember that CLDR had something to say about this too, but I don’t know if there’s any sort of consensus here that’s actually written down anywhere.

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/pull/837

This is pretty much how copy-on-write ropes work. Check out xi-rope, Ropey or crop, they're all built using B-trees and implement the behavior you described.

Helix is awesome, though once Lapce (spiritual successor to Xi editor) gets the Helix/Kakoune editing model, I may have to jump ship

Home (xi-editor.io)

Maybe take a look at the Xi editor (https://xi-editor.io/) (written in rust I think) that uses a client server architecture.

Have a look at what Lapce uses. The editor is coming along nicely, and iirc, they use the Xi editor as a plug-in.

Raph Levien posted a retrospective about using CRDT’s for collaborative editing in xi-editor here [1]. His conclusion is

“I come to the conclusion that the CRDT is not pulling its (considerable) weight. When I think about a future evolution of xi-editor, I see a much brighter future with a simpler, largely synchronous model, that still of course has enough revision tracking to get good results with asynchronous peers like the language server.”

[1]https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...