Artem Loenko on Native Text Rendering

Artem Loenko: Native all the way, until you need text: I did everything people say you should do. Native all the way. I know the platform. I know the options. I know SwiftUI, AppKit, TextKit, WebKit. But I still cannot make a simple thing work properly: a chat with Markdown & the ability to select a whole message. And suddenly it becomes much clearer why most new chat-heavy apps that depend on one of the most important interface patterns of this era – chat, long-form rich text, flexible typography – are web-based in one way or another. In the beginning (aka, Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002), there was nothing better than NSTextView. It evolved, and we eventually got TextKit 2. But something's off about it, and I can't quite explain what or why.