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Comment by marijn | Hacker News Reader

> why wordgard is worth the switching cost?

It may not be. If you're happy with ProseMirror, continue to use ProseMirror. I have your back.

But as the blog posts describes, I had a whole pile of new design insights that avoid some of the issues I've ran into with ProseMirror, so I had the itch to build a new iteration.

I'll add a link to the blog post to the docs section of the website.

(It's marijn, not merijn.)

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Marijn: just came here to say that I think ProseMirror is a brilliantly designed project - that you're intent on improving on it is amazing dedication to your craft.

I always wondered why there is no code/package overlap between CodeMirror and ProseMirror (or now Wordgard). Have you tried this? Were there particular blockers?

There's a significant amount of code in Wordgard that is copy-pasted from CodeMirror or ProseMirror, but modified enough that trying to share it would involve nightmarish amounts of type parameters and extra indirection. You could certainly build a generic editor framework and then build several editors on top of it, but you'd end up with Raku-level amounts of architecture acrobatics and extra complexity, much of which would leak out in the public library interface, and I don't think that is generally worth it. I do occasionally, when I realize a bug fix applies to one of my other projects as well, repeat it there. But that's okay.

I'm part of the Zoho Writer team (Google docs alternative). And the new architecture is very similar to Zoho Writer i.e edits represented as a sequence of retains/keeps followed by action.

Also the decision to forego browser's selection and draw a custom layer.

All this makes reasoning about changes a lot more saner and intuitive. I've always wondered why prosemirror's transactions & steps couldn't be simplified further so I'm one vote up for the new design direction!

Thanks, that would indeed be helpful.

  > (It's marijn, not merijn.)

oeps, sry!

First time I have seen this name.

Wikipedia is intriguingly inconsistent - claims that Marijn is the Dutch variant of Marinus meaning 'marine' like Marius, Mario etc. but other pages claim Marius is more likely to be from 'mars' or 'male' than 'marine'.

I've taken the liberty of correcting the typo in your GP comment. I hope that's ok!

thx!

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