Some more love on document editing

I’m happy that blocks are being implemented in doc views, they are a must. However, the rich text editing I think needs a bit more improvements, as it’s not as smooth as I wanted to be. Most of these are just small things and might be subjective, but it’s something I would like:

  1. Major one - allow indentation when pressing tab for any element. I hate that I can’t indent normal text or checkboxes. Here’s how coda does it Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom

  2. [FIXED - BUG] - when you’re on a checkbox item and press enter, it creates a new empty checkbox. However, sometimes the next time you press enter, either creates another empty checkbox (not desired) either removes the checkbox to add a new normal, non-checkbox item. Creating empty checkbox items is not desired and not consistent. Here’s an ex. Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom

  3. Allow text color change, not just highlights.

  4. [FIXED] Maybe just a personal preference, but heading should be much more distinguishable from normal text. H3 is barely distinguishable, makes thinks harder to read. Maybe increase the size a bit of all headers and bold them. The bottom margin of the headers should be a bit larger, makes things easier to read.

  5. Collapsible icon can be just a tiny bit bigger and have some hover action, feels a bit better when i see in Coda that highlights the arrow when i hover over it. I also like the arrow animation when I click on it.

  6. [DONE] Icon picker for left sidebar items :slight_smile: I know we can simply copy-paste an icon from the web and put it on the beginning of the view name, but would be much better to simply let us pick an icon. You already have the icon picker so…

To be completely honest, I tend to go to Coda for building documents to share with the team, they look cleaner (bigger bolder headers just an example) and are easier to edit. We really want to ditch Coda to not keep things in multiple places, but there are little things like that that keeps us going back to them.

I agree with the general sentiment about the document editing feeling a bit rough around the edges. Here are a few other items I’ve come across:

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Related:

And - could we please have:

  • underlining (oddly preserved when pasted, though unsupported by the editor)
  • left/centered/right alignment (lost when pasting, and unsupported in the editor)

I agree with the potential value of some of these things, to be sure. Others may be down to personal preference, and it makes me wonder then if Fibery team should consider some kind of global CSS modifier per-workspace, that admins can adjust to affect all users of that workspace. This would address issues like header styling, at the least, as well as fonts, size/visibility of sidebar items, etc. All of which are issues/requests here in the forums somewhere, and each of which may be different in preference for different users/teams.

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letting us set a global css applied to workspace would be huge in terms of personalization. For ex. i might prefer a light sidebar instead of darker one, or i would want the items list to have no borders, etc… It might be an overkill for some, but would give a next level customization option.

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Jumping on the CSS-request bandwagon – I would love it if every entity field was tagged (in the HTML) with classes for its containing Type, Fibery type, and field name. This would make it much easier to customize specific fields; e.g., columns in a Table view, based on the field (and not dependent on column order).

I also agree. I think this is the way to go in the short term until some more UI customization tools/interface could be offered.

I can understand Fibery team’s hesitation to opening up this “Pandora’s box” as there will be a flood of themes (some great, some very poorly done) and it will likely distract the larger community from the main focus (I feel roam suffers from this). But even knowing this flexibility is being built into the design and a possibility in the near future would give everyone some reassurance that their particular UI styling woes can be sorted out :slight_smile:

I’ve also notice this omission, although ctrl+u at least works!

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That sounds a bit intense to implement and maintain, if I’m not mistaken. Do you really need per-type CSS customization?

Another big one I remembered today while a wrote features spec is the sub-items numbering. If we have numbered items, sub-items are also numbers. It’s more natural to have letters there. Another thing is that I can’t change the sub-item to be just simple non-ordered/ non-numbered items… they are always numbers. I might want to be checkboxes or normal items.

[Later edit] Following up on last matter, would be super nice if on sub-items when we type “1.” to change the sub-items to numbering, when we type “” to checkboxes and * to normal items …basically like it works when we’re not editing under an item.

To be completely honest, if they just straight up copy the full document editing behaviour from Coda it would be superb.

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My thought was to just convert Type IDs and entity IDs to class names, and add to the appropriate HTML elements - seems like that should be pretty easy to implement.

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Hmm OK. I’m honestly not sure, so you may be right.

And these don’t actually need to be CSS classes – they could just as effectively be custom HTML attributes, as long as we can create selectors to match and style them.

Maybe something like: fibery-typeid="..." and fibery-entityid="..."

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I am now upvoting this largely because of the first request, for indenting. I especially want this for checkboxes. If this should be its own feature request to vote on, then fair enough.

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Any progress here?

6 months passed and none of the issues we listed here were addressed. The document experience is pretty poor even after so long time…

No checkbox indentation, checkboxes bug still present, you can’t combine ordered lists with non-ordered sub-lists or checkboxes and vice-versa, can’t use other type of order style like letters or greek letters, h3 looks almost the same as normal text and so on.

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Hold on, we will get to it soon!

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We could cut down on some of the forum chatter if there were links in the topics here to where we could track an issue’s status and ETA. :bulb:

baby steps… WIP
2022-05-20 14.52.33

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New user here - given all the really amazing features in Fibery, I was kind of surprised to find limits on rich text formatting (font size, color, underline, alignment) - is there a roadmap or an ETA for these features?

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Underlining is possible with Ctrl-U.

It is not possible to set the font colour, but you can set the background colour for a section of text.
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No ETA on alignment I’m afraid.