Replace EasyMDE with textarea

[silverwind]

SimpleMDE is unmaintained and in my opionion very bloated for what it does. It ships with a full version of CodeMirror (a code editor) embedded which enables markdown syntax highlight in the editor, but I think its a neglible feature that is mostly unnecessary as comments are meant to be viewed in rendered mode primarily.

I suggest we switch to a plain <textarea> like the ones Github and Gogs use. Some buttons to insert pre-generated snippets at the cursor can be provided. Emoji can be supported via :token: to Unicode replacement or directly as Unicode as always. Image-based custom emoji can not render in it, but they may in the rendered view (thought Unicode should be preferred).

[jolheiser]

I personally love this idea, I always end up turning it off immediately.
That being said, I think many users enjoy the WYSIWYG.

If we had a toolbar similar to GH that injected symbols (e.g. bold would wrap your cursor with ****) perhaps that would be a good trade-off?
I'm unsure about removing a feature unless we have a good alternative.

[silverwind]

Yes of course, formatting buttons must be provided for a viable alternative. Also, @mentions and :emoji have to work. I wonder if there is maybe a JS library around that can provide markdown-formatting functionality to a <textarea>, or if we have to code those up ourselves.

I think it may be beneficial to first do the transition to unicode emoji (which means replacing emojify.js with something that emits proper unicode instead of images, except on custom emoji).

[bobemoe]

I did a review of several WYSIWYG markdown editors over in #9619 and found Ace was beginning to look promising as it was also being considered for the code editor.

I'm afraid I didn't find time to continue with it but it may be worth checking out from #9619 (comment) onwards

I would be happy with plain <textarea> too, but also agree some of my colleagues would prefer (basic) WYSIWYG.

[silverwind]

I think WYSIWYG goes against the spirit of Markdown, which is meant to be edited in plaintext.

[bobemoe]

Yeah, you're right. Something simple like this GitHub editor would be perfect.

[silverwind]

Indeed, GH's one is quite nice. It's just a lightweight textarea with a few formatting/snippets buttons. I guess such functionality can be replicated in like 5-10kB of JS.

[guillep2k]

We need to keep in sight that many Gitea end users are not programmers (e.g. someone who reports a bug on an end-user product), so I think WYSIWYG is important as an option.

[silverwind]

I don't think Markdown is hard to learn and with the formatting buttons offered, it should become clear how it works pretty fast. GitHub never offered Markdown WYSIWYG and I think it's just silly if we would do so.

[lunny]

@silverwind We could make that as a user level options. :)

[suli3]

Most of the un-programmers are familiar with office, what they want to do is copy doc words to the issue and hope that these words could be as shown in the office.

[silverwind]

copy doc words

Markdown only supports a small subset of what is possible in such documents (colors, font face, exact font sizes, underline, background color and many more). Those users would be better off just attaching said document.