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0 pointsbenrbray6y ago0 comments

Looks great, I'll try to check again in a few days for the new version!

Other than tags/search, one thing that is very important to me is "first-class" math support, where I can enter LaTeX math notation that renders inline, but which behaves like text whenever the cursor enters the math block. In general, I always appreciate when editors locally "act like" a plain text file near the cursor, but abstract away all the markup wherever I'm not directly editing. Two editors that get this right are Typora (inline-level editing) and Jupyter notebooks (block-level editing).

I agree that ProseMirror has a steep learning curve, and there aren't currently enough open-source extensions available. Hopefully, with time, enough standard components will emerge. In the future, I hope to see a ProseMirror-backed drop-in Markdown editor become the default for browser-based editing.

ProseMirror doesn't currently have standard support for wysiwyg-math, but I've recently been working to change that [1]:

[1]: proof of concept: https://codesandbox.io/s/quizzical-austin-m7n3t?file=/src/in...

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2 comments · 1 top-level

lukevp6y ago· 1 in thread

Thanks for the kind comments! I will put your vote in for this feature and bookmark the link for future reference. Our focus is on expanding the feature set in ways that are more emergent, so the UI stays very clean and straightforward and features that users don’t use don’t clutter up the interface. This seems like a good candidate for a feature that could be only available to those who need it and not affect the workflow of others by working similarly to the # flow.

Would a good workflow be to type a hot key to pop open a full screen editor for the math notation, like how the # or @ work when typed? Perhaps with a live preview as you type?

What would be a reasonable key to trigger that, is there a standard trigger key for math like there is @ for people and # for hashtags?

benrbrayOP6y ago

Normally there are two types of math: inline and block. Inline math is delimited with single dollar signs like $x+y=5$, while display math uses two dollar signs with newlines, like

    $$
    \int_a^b f'(x) dx = f(b)-f(a)
    $$

You can find some GIFs of the ideal behavior here [1], but it's understandable that such a thing might not be a priority for most users.

The next best thing would definitely be a popup! A natural toggle button would be $, though it may make more sense to only insert math on a quick double-tap of $, so users can still write about money :). Assigning it to CTRL+4 or similar might also be a good compromise.

[1]: https://github.com/benrbray/prosemirror-math

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