To be clear, this is not a feature request. I’m posing the question more as an attempt to get some ideas for implementing a userscript solution or get directed to any existing solutions. Any suggestion (from users or devs) is welcome
Direct editing of RENDERD content is the one thing about Workflowy that I miss since switching to Dynalist.
One big reason is the constant switching back and forth from two editing modes. I used to write entire papers in workflowy, and with Dynalist I find myself not doing that as much, and one big reason is the disruptive mental effect caused by switching in and out of editing mode. If you’re simply keeping data in Dynalist I can see this not being a big deal, but if you’re literally writing and thinking in it, well, for me at least it’s been a HUGE issue. Imagine if Microsoft Word flashed your screen every time you hit ‘Enter’. I don’t think anyone would have composed anything in Word!
Another, even bigger reason, is the huge numbers of hacking potentials that comes from doing away with the mode switch. For example, if you have tags in workflowy, you can style them to look super nice ─── even look totally different from their actual textual content. And you may rely on these tags looking a specific way because e.g. you have a convention where a tag’s being red carries a specific meaning, so that their suddenly losing those colors while you’re editing can be very disorienting. All the cues are gone.
As I understand it, this wouldn’t be a difficult thing to accomplish. I used to tweak Workflowy’s js a lot (using a local override) and the way workflowy does it really is no more complicated than (i) making the list node div ‘contenteditable’ and (ii) (as I recall) doing some calculations to keep the caret offset the correct value (because of the presence of html codes like messes up the default caret offset value)
Would this be a difficult thing to implement in Dynalist? Is there any existing userscript solution? Any pointers would be suggested. I doubt this is something Dynalist Team would be interested in implementing. It’s pretty idiosyncratic request anyways. But I suspect there are other users out there (who are more used to traditional WYSIWYG editors) who finds the constant switch between editing modes a hindrance to actual content creation (as opposed to using it as a place to keep data)