This week we’re taking at look at the new inline text editor. While the UI isn’t finished, it was all based on the feedback you gave us a few weeks ago. I think it’s shaping up to be rather nice
Watch today’s video below and give us your feedback, is this what you need? Do other web editors do it better? Text is the most important thing on a website, so we want to make sure this kicks-ass
btw. The changes we’re making with the text engine and the new V2 Components require a little longer in the over, so there probably won’t be a new beta this week, sorry!
Thanks
We’re listening to all your feedback and working super hard to make Elements the perfect website builder.
Thanks @Dan! I think this is going in the right direction, but as you say, it’s very bare bones right now. IMO having to have the Tailwind CSS docs open to format and style text by adding classes isn’t a great user experience. Looking forward to seeing it when it’s more polished.
On thing that might help when formatting text is to be able to see the text runs/spans in the node inspector as children of the text element. This way you can quickly get an idea of what text has additional properties or attributes applied to it, as well as providing a quick way of selecting the desired text itself — instead of always having to drag to select (ie. selecting the child node in the node editor also selects the entire same text span in the visual WYSIWYG editor).
I too think that more typography controls could be added. But don’t overload it. The animation, transition on hover etc. is nice, but I’m not sure if controls for those should be added. That’s what the class field is for imho.
And why not have a little link in the sidebar below the classes area, that opens the tailwind docs typography section? That link might even go below every classes field for quick access.
I think the basics are pretty well covered and I’d be happy with being able to access bold, italic, underline and text colour. Being able to change the font of a word without a class would be good but if it’s well documented it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Adding every possible option would be like going back to the early days of desktop publishing where people were using every font and style possible - just because they could - and creating horribles messes.
Personally I’d like to see a classes/snippet library which is tucked away until someone decides they need to ‘code’ some extra modifications.
Just like Dan used his notepad in the demo to hold a few classes, this would be a nice inclusion with a handful of code snippets which could easily be added to the classes area as needed. It could come wth a few standard classes but could be added to be the user.
I know I put that in there. Please know I never expected that @dan would add it all. However, the most common used design elements should be included as shortcuts rather than the need to use copy-paste classes.
Update: I know it’s been said a lot. But look at Apple Pages. That is the correct list of features in my opinion— text and paragraph styling and spacing. I understand the goal is to get things to match up with the core of TailwindCSS. However for some things having an override option would be ideal. Maybe add a warning or note that says manual overrides slightly increase file sizes with each use.
Since there is such a commitment to Tailwind, why not have some sort of pop-up or there device that shows the relevant Tailwind classes so that a user can just select it?
Before you all pass out that I didn’t mention AI here it is. Provide a chatbot for the class field that is linked to the Tailwind docs. A user can describe what they want to happen and the chatbot can suggest the proper class.
Hi Dan.
The test editor looks great. And though I’m not able to write HTML, it seems to work alright with the tailwind-ccs classes.
But I do agree with this comment:
Thanks for all the feedback, it was super interesting to hear what everyone wants from text editing
We’re going to continue building out the feature set of the text editing engine a little further, but it’s never going to be a fully fledged word-processor (and nor should it be). It will however, be very flexible and hopefully it’ll achieve most of what you want to do within a block of text.
We have bigger plans than we have time to implement right now. This is why features like the classes area is just a text box and not a tokenized auto-completing class manager. It’s things like this that we can “upgrade” to later once we’ve shipped Elements.
Right now it’s about getting a usable product out the door, and I think the sooner we do that the better!
now that was funny.