Tracy Ruggles helped getting a better formatting UI (modeled after CKEditor at that time) for Socialtext — screenshot at https://www.socialtext.net/help-en/socialcalc_move_source_ex... — but something more touch-friendly and intuitive (post-bootstrap) would be awesome.
Please get in touch on ethercalc repo or write me if you know a UX designer interested in revamping our UI!
* understand how event bubbling works (so that you can put something more complex than a html button in a html cell, maybe a select menu)
* disable dynamic rendering (where cells get reinstantiated upon each redraw)
* possibly implement both by using a specific th cell subtype
By the way I've been able to bake in extended excel formula support from the formulajs project by hacking inside the SocialCalc.CalculateFunction function.. Bit of a kludge but it's handy to support some of them more arcane xl functions.
I've still going to use it because yes, it's very necessary to have a social spreadsheet platform that is open-source and that you can host on your own servers. Thanks for the work you put in.
Re UI, each cell supports basic WikiText, and clicking the "Format" tab next to the default "Edit" shows the Format:Text dropdown that one can change to "HTML" and then click the top-left "Save to: CellCoordinate". That allows arbitrary HTML in cell presentations.
Alignment, font, etc can also be adjusted in the same tab.
If you'd like to use HTML formatting for all cells by default, the third button on that tab "Show sheet settings" allows sheet-wide formatting customizations. Hope this helps!