A few suggestions to make compositor more robust

[NikoKrause]

I like the idea behind Compositor and had recently the chance to try it. I opened a template, started to change some text and ran pretty easy in some issues/erros, which I wasn't able to fix within Compositor.

E.g. when I try to change the title/author/section: I delete the template text and want to type my own text. But as soon as I have deleted the template text, I'm no longer able to type in my own text. The title/author/section seems to disappear.

With this method I even got a compiling error, iirc it was after deleting the title. I wasn't able to fix it, I couldn't find a way to look into the code. Not sure if I just didn't found the button, where to switch to the source code, or if Compositor doesn't has this feature.

My suggestions are:

• Add a button or the ability to switch between the source code and the preview. Compositor is for users, who don't want to deal with the source code, but sometimes it's necessary to look into it, if you run into a serious issue/compiling error.
• If you delete a section, etc. don't delete it immediately after you delete the last character of the section.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with the (online) Overleaf editor. I have tried it today for the first time and if you haven't tried it yet, you might want to try it as well (https://www.overleaf.com/19372096ppxrzvhshqyw). At the top left corner it has a switch "Source - Rich Text", which is in beta. The following GIF shows, how it handles sections, which I think might be nice to see in Compositor as well:

[ktraunmueller]

Niko,

sorry for not responding earlier, it seems my notification settings were wrong, so I didn't notice that you created a ticket.

I fully agree that sometimes it's necessary to edit the LaTeX source, so I implemented an inline source editor in Compositor (available since 1.0).

Whenever you have focused some region of text (i.e., there's a blinking caret), you should see a hint at the bottom of the page on how to open the source editor:

Pressing Ctrl S will open the source editor for the focused region of text:

If you don't see the shortcut hint, please check your preferences (⌘ ,). There's a checkbox that needs to be checked:

As for the problem with the vanishing sections: the basic idea is to clean up empty commands from the LaTeX source. So an empty \section{} or an empty list item \item will currently be deleted, to not clutter up the code with "zombies". I understand that the user experience around this behavior is currently not the best, and I will try to improve this. I like the idea of showing some kind of placeholder, maybe until you press delete backward once more to make it go away.

Thanks for your feedback

[fluxtransistor]

I think that although the current "view source" behaviour is useful when adjusting a document that already works, the option simply doesn't work when a document hasn't been typeset correctly.

For example, an out-of-memory error leads to no output, and consequently the source editor is greyed out.