As a historical note, at the start of TW5 development in 2010/11 I was 
determined to make it a WYSIWYG editor. The main problem I ran into was that at 
that time the so-called "contentEditable" feature was unreliable and 
inconsistent across different browsers. That's different now, happily.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/contentEditable

The next problem was architectural: that using "contentEditable" produces HTML. 
The problem of reliably converting arbitrary HTML to wikitext is quite thorny, 
and I wanted to avoid getting bogged down in it.

Finally, while working through it, I realised that even with a WYSIWYG editor, 
we'd still need separate view and edit modes. Consider a tiddler that contains 
some text with a transclusion somewhere within it. In view mode, the reader 
sees a seamless block of text, with no indication of the presence of the 
transclusion. Imagine that the user wants to change the transclusion to 
reference a different tiddler. For that, the user needs to see a visual 
representation of the transclusion itself so that they can interact with it and 
edit it. Given the need for transclusions to be invisible in normal use, all of 
that implies a separate mode in which widgets are editable rather than rendered 
as usual.

So, straightforward blocks of text containing formatting like bold and italic 
could be directly edited without needing to flip into edit mode, but some 
actions would require it.

Allowing direct editing of rendered output presents some difficulties, too. 
With the above example, imagine if the user selects text that spans the text of 
the transclusion and the surrounding text and then tries to delete it. Perhaps 
that would translate into deleting text from two separate tiddlers, but that 
seems counterintuitive for users.

A recent commercial project I've undertaken as Federatial 
(https://federatial.com) for law firm client required a WYSIWYG editor, but 
they were happy to use HTML as their content format, so I have developed a very 
simple HTML WYSIWYG editing widget based on https://quilljs.com. At some point 
I'll polish it up for more general use.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

--
Jeremy Ruston
jer...@jermolene.com
https://jermolene.com

> On 23 Oct 2019, at 14:57, 'Mark S.' via TiddlyWiki 
> <tiddlywiki@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> 
> At the heart of it all is a certain discontent with the two-mode aspect of 
> TW.
> 
> Everything Mat asks for is already available in edit mode.
> 
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