[DISCUSSION] Is Toast UI Editor the right editor to continue with long term?

Context

When we started our journey creating the Static Site Editor we imagined users wanting both a WYSIWYG editor as well as a lower-level markdown editor with preview functionality.

Toast UI Editor was evaluated and found to meet most of our needs and so we started our journey by integrating it into our product. For reference here are the evaluations:

As we have progressed on our journey our understanding of our users' needs and product vision have evolved. At the same time we have been needing to interact with Toast UI APIs to meet our product requirements, however, at times have found the currently available APIs to be limiting and now giving us the flexibility we need.

The Toast UI Editor provides a wrapper around two other editor projects, CodeMirror for the raw Markdown editing and Squire for the WYSIWYG editing. It also has a really powerful Markdown rending preview coupled with its Markdown editing mode.

To be clear, Toast UI Editor is a great editor satisfying a specific use-case in a very elegant manner, but the considerations we had at the start of our journey that made it a great fit have evolved. This has brought us to a point where we are re-considering whether Toast UI is the right editor for us going forward.

Considerations

  • We are currently investing a lot of time into customizing the Toast UI Editor's markdown editing experience to our needs: !35347 (comment 371233055)
  • We are considering using Editor Lite (Monaco based) for Markdown editing: #225417 (comment 374560496)
  • We are also considering not offering a raw Markdown editor experience as part of the Static Site Editor once our feature becomes more complete (e.g. when you can edit front matter via the UI)
  • By introducing Toast UI Editor we brought a new breed of editor into the GitLab product that is trying to standardize largely on the Monaco editor: &498 (closed)
  • There are some challenges with the way Toast UI re-formats Markdown source code and an elegant solution is not yet available: https://github.com/nhn/tui.editor/issues/1066
  • Does Toast UI Editor provide value beyond just being a wrapper over other editor projects that we need/would want to continue to rely on?
  • Is it feasible for us to write our own wrapper over other editors? What does the effort investment look like?

Expected outcome

Form an opinion on whether we should stick with Toast UI or whether we need to start evaluation other more low-level editors.
A decision on which editors to pursue, if that is the opinion, is not required.

/cc @gl-static-site-editor

Edited by Jean du Plessis