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?
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.
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 @anon29869905 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.
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.
Hey @mr-vinn 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.
We are also pretty stoked about the idea of Markdown support. Could you guys not do it while implementing BOTH Markdown and the more user-friendly WYSIWYG? Just have the WYSIWYG alias to Markdown in the editor, offer a quick and easy way to switch for power users, and then simply render it to HTML? Then n00bs AND power users are happy!
Hi! We’d like to look into and contribute to this feature too but before investing dev-times we wanted to know if there’s any update on the UI stack shift or the development of an editor by the core team itself.
Thanks!
I concur here - there are plenty WYSIWYG Markdown Editors out there, I am pretty sure there is something readily embeddable available, some like HedgeDoc even have inbuild Vim emulation thanks to using such standard components https://hedgedoc.org
Their 2.0 UI will be decoupled from the frontend, maybe an opportunity?
Hello, I made a post about this too and with suggestions for improvements, I consider Markdown support essential and fundamental and it is something relatively simple to add, it can start little by little with less resources, but it is important to have at least one parser added, it even has several in Ruby ready and good>
Here’s the post I made about it:
I favor Markdown over direct HTML, including Documentation, Knowledge Base, Blog, Ticket, Email and other use cases, due to standardization and ease of use.
I recommend Monaco as a base editor because it is rich in features and easier to add new features: Monaco Editor
"The Monaco Editor is the code editor that powers VS Code. A good page describing the code editor’s features is here. It is licensed under the MIT License and supports Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks.Find more information at the Monaco Editor repo.
"
It can be used with Preview, Fixed Toc, Snippets and other features, we even did that and we can release our Monaco with new features if you want to use it in Zammad or another idea is to use some simple JS, the most important being that you can see the code mode /Markdown or even ideal to have no visual mode.
This forum even has a beautiful Markdown editor with very interesting features.
Most likely the only answer you will get is the good old fashioned “It’s ready when it’s ready”.
Developers have to prioritize paid endorcements from their paying customers postponing any free community enhancements, especially non-critical for stable operation like UI enhancements. That’s the norm for “all” projects that offer a free community version.
You can always check their Github page for activity and maybe there’s a public beta already, if so, always test on a new server/vm and never your active environment.
You are right, things do take time, however, the same response for 5 years (your first response was in Sept. 2020) means that having the community do work to implement may have provided beneficial updates that are usable and could be incorporated into the work you and the team are doing.
We appreciate all the work you are doing to make this product what it is, but “when it’s ready” is not really an answer.
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.