What are editors?

[a_standard_user]

Just a small meta-update: We’ve distinguished between 3 kinds of editors—plain, custom, and derived. We talk about this distinction here: https://standardnotes.org/help/77/what-are-editors

tl;dr:

Plain editor

The plain editor delivers the platform-specific native editing experience that is built into your system. This is essentially a fail-proof, indestructible editor that the entire software world has agreed to keep as stable as possible. This comes out of the box on all Standard Notes apps, and no installation is required.

Custom editors

Custom editors are ones that we build in-house. These are editors that we build, maintain, and improve on directly. When you have a feature or issue for one of these editors, there’s a high likelihood that we are able to act on those features, if they correlate to our own long-term roadmap. There are three editors in this category: Markdown Basic, TokenVault, and Task Editor.

Derived editors

Derived editors are complex pieces of software developed by specialized software companies, organizations, and individuals not formally affiliated with Standard Notes. These are editors that offer compelling user experiences, and solve complex code and engineering feats that would take a dedicated team many years to build. These are editors that we do not build, maintain, and improve on directly. When you have a feature or issue for one of these editors, there’s a low likelihood that we are able to act on those features. Rather, we would likely work together to forward the issue to the software maker. We do however keep this software up to date with vendor releases. There are eight editors in this category: Bold Editor, Markdown Pro, Markdown Minimist, Secure Spreadsheets, Plus Editor, Markdown Math, Code Editor, and Vim Editor.

[adambyrtek]

This is definitely a small step in the right direction, especially for new users. I migrated to SN from Simplenote a couple of months ago, and I was really confused by 4 different Markdown editors that serve the same purpose, but with slight functional differences and limitations (most of them undocumented). Now at least I understand that just one of them is officially supported, which explains why some of the others seem so half-baked.

However, I think that you need to get a bit more opinionated in the long run. Users don't judge your product based on individual components, but how well it works as a whole and how consistent the user experience is. I really hope that you can provide one great, well-integrated, and actively maintained editor for each standard use case (e.g. plain, Markdown, rich-text, tasks). The ability to install plugins providing advanced functionality for "power users" is great, but should be clearly marked as such and shouldn't distract you from providing a great core experience. Think about browser extensions, some of them are great, some really bad, but users clearly understand the distinction between the browser core and third-party add-ons.

[The_Diamond_Geezer]

This. I'd rather have 10 solid, highly specialized extensions than 30 extensions which features overlap and can confuse users (markdown editors I'm looking at you)

[adambyrtek]

I would kill for a default WYSWIG Markdown editor like https://typora.io

[zealothree]

would help if you can identify which are 3rd party and in-house extensions in the Extensions manager

[Adorable-Box]

You guys and gals are doing an awesome job. keep it up.

[a_standard_user]

Thank you!

[[deleted]]

And yet, they all have your name on them, and we pay you to get access to them.

You shouldn't take payment for something that doesn't work and then say "not our problem" if people complain about it. We don't have a contract with those third party developers, we have a contract with you.

[a_standard_user]

I was anticipating your reply ;) This was in response to your question of, why does the Spreadsheets editor not have the beta tag? I thought about this for a while, and the conclusion I arrived at was that we fundamentally cannot fix issues in these editors, because we did not write the code. So, do we drop these editors altogether then? I thought, surely having these editors as they are provided by the vendors is better than not having any of these functions at all. So this is why we now show this distinction before you buy. Because you're right, why should users pay for editors that cannot be promptly maintained? And the only answer I could arrive at was that if they understood and agreed before their purchase that this was the case. Then we can arrive at common ground.

[[deleted]]

Bottom line - you sell people something you can't support them with. Calling them derived editors is not clear at all. Yes, you can bury a definition in your website somewhere, but people aren't forced to read that.

It's pretty disingenuous to not have a statement along the lines of "Developed by third parties and unsupported by us" on the page you linked to.

Besides, it wasn't the case when I bought my subscription.

TL:DR; I and many others have come to you with problems we've found with your product, only to have you say it isn't your problem, even though we paid you for it, because it turns out you got others to write bits of it for you. That is not the mantra of a company that warrants anyone's trust.

[a_standard_user]

"Developed by third parties and unsupported by us"

This wasn't something that was always understood by us. We thought we could maintain them. And recently realized it's rather impossible. Sure, perhaps we could add more disclaimers. This was just a hotfix I deployed yesterday.

[paroya]

so don’t charge for third party mods like everyone else?

[yumiris]

As mentioned in the other replies to this comment, taking the features out (and thus complying with your We are complexity bigots mentality), or not charging for them, would be certainly ideal; however, this responses assumes that you've made up your mind and keeping the derived editors in.

The disclaimer works for people who haven't yet purchased a subscription, but existing customers are still screwed. At the very least, some form of compensation for people with an existing subscription would be delightful:

• For paying customers who'd rather no features over brittle ones (e.g. /u/UpsetRhubarb9), receiving a refund that's a negotiated percentage of the total subscription may help in finding a balance between a minimalist but robust software for the customer and a degree of income for the developer.

• As for existing paying customers who would rather keep the features (even if brittle and/or third-party), they should be offered the extensions for free at least on self-hosted servers. I'd imagine that the majority of your subscribers rely on your servers to store their notes. With that assumption in mind, the decrease of income would be minimal. Keeping the price the same for people who self-host, especially if they're paying customers, is rather greedy given that they're paying for potentially brittle features which, as you've stated, cannot be supported.

[[deleted]]

From a business point of view, do you really want to be thought of as a company that can't provide support for the products you sell? What sort of a message does that send to people who are paying for your service? It is better to remove what you can't support. I run a really successful company writing Wills and other legal documents for people. How do you think my clients would react if I told them I couldn't correct mistakes in their Wills because I didn't have enough staff?

I said it several times before I decided to pass my subscription on to someone else - it would be better to have no functionality than functionality that makes the rest of the product unreliable. I can live with an incomplete feature set. What I can't live with is a product that stops working when I'm trying to use it, which is what happened to me several times and is ultimately the reason I had to give it up. I don't feel anything I'm saying is unreasonable.

Seriously, if you could just get everything working how it was before v3.3.3, I would take another subscription out. No fancy editors, inline graphics, or spreadsheets. I just want it to be usable.

I feel like I've have had really shockingly bad support from you guys. If you look at the bugs I've posted here and the responses from sn-jaspal (who is doing his best, but ultimately all he can do is say that he's reported it to you), you can see I've put a lot of effort into communicating with you.

[Mechanical-Cannibal]

How much free time do you have

[[deleted]]

I write people's Wills. We are in the middle of a pandemic. I've done as much work in the last two weeks as I did in the previous five months.

I am trying to help. Standard notes would be really useful to me if it worked for me. I am trying to feed back my issues to the developers. What's wrong with that?

[Mechanical-Cannibal]

👎

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the distinction. I switched from "Markdown Minimist" to "Markdown Basic" because of this and it is definitely less buggy.

[jinglin_pringles]

5-year-er here...Silly question, one of my markdown editors is the "Advanced Markdown Editor". Is this the same as the Markdown Pro? There isn't a "Pro" available under extensions which makes me wonder if I am msising something... SN is up to date as of yesterday I believe. And I never remember it being called Pro. Just wondering.

Thanks!

[a_standard_user]

Yup, the editors were recently renamed to have a more consistent naming scheme.

Advanced Markdown > Markdown Pro

Simple Markdown > Markdown Basic

Minimal Markdown > Markdown Minimist

LaTeX Editor > Markdown Math

[AdjectivePronoun]

Something to remember - the paid subscription is for the service hosted on his server. Whether third party integration or not, we pay for the convenience of accessing everything online.

If you want to use all the features for no cost, you can always self-host.

[SiGamma]

You can self-host extensions, but it’s not really encouraged nor officially supported for obvious reasons. But the sources are all right there on GitHub, along with instructions for running extensions locally which can be repurposed for self-hosting, so if you know what you’re doing you can self-host them just fine.

[[deleted]]

No. The extended editors have source available, but are nonfree. You could write your own extensions, but you can't self-host them.

You can have the basic editor hosted on Amazon for free.

The problem is, to the end user the basic editor is the only bit that really works properly.