Thank you for Textual

[stephent]

Excited to see this new project - thanks for creating it!

I'm in the process of adding contextual markdown help content to my app. I tried a medium length document in MarkdownUI and it took a looonnnng time to render. In Textual, it's <1s every time - looking great so far!

[cyrilzakka]

Agreed, thank you for this. Are there any plans to roll out some sort of caching mechanism so that only new deltas are rendered on updates instead of the full markdown block?

[gonzalezreal]

Thanks @stephent! Happy to hear Textual is working for you.
Hi @cyrilzakka 👋, what is the use case for that? A markdown async stream? (ie. coming from an AI agent).

[cyrilzakka]

@gonzalezreal Correct otherwise performance has been great. I'm still trying to debug a view draw/animation on load which seems to happen at times but the extensibility of this library has been great, thank you.

[gonzalezreal]

Rendering an async markdown stream requires a dedicated view with access to the internal machinery to be performant. I will consider adding this on the roadmap.

[cyrilzakka]

Thanks! I forked the project and added block level caching among other utilities. Happy to submit a PR once I have a chance to clean up and measure performance

[jmfieldman]

@gonzalezreal we're using MarkdownUI in a project and I'd love to try Textual out, but we're targeting an earlier minimum iOS version and unable to import the package. (note that MarkdownUI allows iOS v15)

As a suggestion to make it easier to migrate from MarkdownUI, maybe you can tag the internal code w/ @available(iOS 18.0, *) so that the Textual package as a whole can target 15.0, and we could branch between MarkdownUI/Textual based on runtime checks.

Thanks!

[gonzalezreal]

Hi @jmfieldman,

That is a fair point. Unfortunately, core features like attachment layout and text selection are built on top of Text.Layout which is available from iOS 17. Selection is tricky, it relies on Text.Layout internals (accessed through reflection) that are available from iOS 18. So, we could lower platform requirements to a minimum of iOS 17 if we gate text selection to iOS 18 onwards.

[jmfieldman]

Lowering to v17 would be great for my particular case (since that is our current min target) 🙏

[jmfieldman]

btw just to clarify, i'm not even suggesting that you do the work of splitting out internal code based on version. you could conceivably tag everything as only available with the current min versions you have today. but then you can drop the Package.swift min version. we'd still only be able to include Textual in iOS 18, but at least we could import the library and make the decision at runtime.

[rlaurbach]

I've been using MarkdownUI for some time (thank you! It's great!) I currently use it in general-use apps to provide styled online help, for generating attractive reports, and (in a developer-tools app) for styled text entry.

Currently in my developer-tool app (where knowing Markdown can be expected) I use the traditional two-view [i.e., text entry in one view, Markdown preview in another] approach.

I would love to move to using Textual for end-user styled text entry for apps that focus on users who don't know Markdown. I.e., I want to add formatting menus and the like. I.e., I'm looking for a traditional styled-text editor view.

1. Is Textual envisioned as supporting end-user styled text editing?\
2. If so, has it progressed far enough to support that?
3. Do you plan to include demos or other tools to make this use case easy to implement?

Thanks again.

[calebhailey]

I literally found this discussion thread because I was headed to the issues to post a "THANK YOU"! 🙏

Really excellent work!