Text editor enhancements

Development
#1

I noticed that several people have asked for improvements to the text editor, both here and on Github. Personally, I would love to see Markdown support along with a WYSIWYG toolbar. I think this site is a good example, where the GUI tools simply insert the appropriate Markdown syntax.

I would like to implement this feature, and I’m hoping to get some feedback from the Zammad team on how to proceed. This is a pretty big change—is this even something that you’d accept from a community pull request? The threads I linked to suggest that you may already have this on your roadmap, and I don’t want to duplicate any internal efforts for this. If you’re open to the contribution, do you have preferences for the direction of this feature or would you like to see a proof of concept first?

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#2

Welcome to the community,

in general we always try to cover 80% of the community for a core functionality.
So in general: If your implementation covers 80% and thus no edge cases, it has good chances.

We already accepted some community based pull requests:

As for the editor, the development currently is working on transition between technologies which affects the UI. This is the reason I can’t tell you “just do it” without knowing how bad your code would be affected.

I’d suggest to wait for @thorsteneckel who has a much better in depth view on “how good” that idea is.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m just trying to save you from wasted time or frustration. :slight_smile:

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#3

Thanks @MrGeneration, I appreciate the feedback. I did get the impression from other posts that there are some major changes planned for the frontend. I have some experience with frontend Javascript/Coffeescript and would be happy to pitch in—feel free to contact me privately. In the meantime, I think I’ll defer any specific work on the rich text editor until the new UI stack is in place.

#4

Hey @mr-vinn :wave: Great to hear that you want to contribute / apply some changes to the editor. It’s actually one of the most pain points and gets requested a lot. However, you’re right. We’re currently evaluating a change in our tech stack. This will also be major changes that affect the current editor. While I would love to see some improvements to the editor I think it will be much time spend on moving into the direction of a dead end. So I’d second your decision to postpone the work on the editor for now.

Thanks for the offer! I’ll definitely get in touch with you once we got some concrete information to share. Should take long though.

Looking forward! Happy hacking.

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