StackExchange
Any plans to publish ProseMirror utils / markdown-it packages?
Hi! I'm working on an extensible WYSIWYG markdown editor based on ProseMirror, and recently came across this project. Since I was planning to eventually include support for spoilers (inline and block), strikethrough, pipetables, and other non-commonmark features, seeing the progress y'all have made open-sources is extremely exciting! I was wondering if there were any plans to publish some of the markdown-it plugins, prosemirror plugins/commands/utils, etc in a separate package, so they could be used (and contributed to) by other markdown editors? For instance, my use case would include inline spoilers, which aren't currently supported here, but which I'm sure would be useful to your users as well. We'll also eventually want to support a LaTeX input area (probably keeping it raw, but we can't have the input being escaped on serialization).
I think this is a valid suggestion and something I'd be open to tackle in the future if we know it's gonna be helpful for others.
However, maintaining separate packages for utils, plugins, commands, etc. comes with a lot of extra burden. Someone's got to extract the code, keep it neat, document it, make sure it's reusable, and so on. Right now we've thrown everything into one codebase because it's easy and uncomplicated. We know our specific use case and can tailor everything to that. Building things for reuse often forces you to think about interfaces, breaking changes, and different peoples needs much more. I'd hate to over-abstract interfaces without knowing what other people want to use them for.
Again, I'm totally open decouple things that can be useful for others if we find a good point to do so (or someone to kickstart this). I'm hesitant to start decoupling just for the sake of it as I see the risk that this quickly becomes overwhelming for little to no benefit. Hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the response! That's certainly quite reasonable, especially with the project still in alpha stages of rollout. Publishing this now would probably quintuple (at least!) the project's public API. In the future, good candidates for separate packages might be the block spoilers markdown-it extension and the ProseMirror table support. I'm very excited to see how this project develops: it's nice to see such a well-designed "markdown+" ProseMirror editor!