WIP: Replace easymde with textarea

[silverwind]

WIP on the easymde replacement. Basically it rips out EasyMDE without much second thought. Issue commenting works but other things may be broken.

TODOs:

• Fix up loose ends, quote reply, image paste, etc
• Replace Tribute with something better, remove RequireTribute
• Finish style removal, remove _editor.less
• Add toolbar when editing markdown files in the repo
• Fix review textarea
• Re-Implement fullscreen side-by-side (maybe for another PR)

Fixes #10729 and a probably 30 other issues.

[zeripath]

Our users really really like the WYSIWYG editor.

I think this has to be an option to switch between editors. In fact we need to have the option to use easymde as the main editor too.

[silverwind]

WYSIWYG

You can't really call it that. It's more like a strange mixup between HTML and Markdown inside a buggy editor that is not accessible. Markdown was not designed for this and neither GitHub or GitLab offer such a mode. If anything, it should be opt-in.

I still think a majority of users would prefer a plaintext editor, it's only natural for developers.

[silverwind]

Rebased and kept the CodeMirror files in the repo for now make the diff more manageable.

Any more feedback on whether we can go ahead with this?

To me it's still a clear case. I curse at EasyMDE almost daily when it decides to delete entered text because of its atrocious handling of backtick characters.

[richmahn]

I still think a majority of users would prefer a plaintext editor, it's only natural for developers.

While I understand what is going on here, as I implemented the original File editing feature for Gogs back in 2016 with CodeMirror and have made a few fixes once we all switched over to Gitea, just want to say we have thousands of users and not a single one is a developer. We use this for content, in various forms (Markdown, HTML, TSV, USFM, RST). We would have to figure out how we can properly have some sort of preview and WYSIWYG.

[igalic]

how many of those thousands of users have to, occasionally, use gitea from a mobile device?

[richmahn]

@igalic at least a hundred use our site directly, https://git.door43.org, but good point, as mobile apps have nothing to do with this feature. :)

[igalic]

unless the mobile app is Firefox, in which case, good luck, mozilla-mobile/fenix#4208

[silverwind]

We would have to figure out how we can properly have some sort of preview and WYSIWYG.

There's a "Preview" Tab right above the editor, is that really so hard to discover?

I think I would implement some form of side-by-side editor, but the rendering has to be done by the server to match the actual output so there will be a slight delay to update the preview. Currently what EasyMDE shows may totally not match what the final result will be.

[fnetX]

Just adding my thoughts:

• I only write markdown and don't want to rely on any special markup in the editor
• preview: works fine!
• side-by-side should be optional IMHO and sounds more like a plan for the future, unless you're really fond of working on it

Oh and thank you very much for working on it! 💯
I'm really looking forward no longer to see weird editor bugs or hear users complaining about Gitea being inaccessible to mobile devices

[silverwind]

I plan to pick this up again given the positive feedback. I think it outweights the negative ones :)

Maybe I will skip side-by-side mode reimplementation and defer it to another PR. I think it's not an essential feature to have and would require additional backend changes that might over-complicate this PR.

[silverwind]

This is now too far out of date to be of any use, but we should still pursue it.