There is much talk about AI, how it can do this, how it will do that, how it’s bad and how it’s terrible. This post isn’t about how you’re bad for using AI, I rely on AI services for very important and less essential things on a daily basis. That includes writing code I’d rather not write, so I can’t judge vibecoders in any way. I only expect one thing from them, a thing I expect from anyone writing code: make sure it works.
It’s the most obvious thing. It’s the first thing you should do whenever you finish making something. Test it out, type a few things. It should be second nature, but not to some. Certainly not to developers of quill, a screen reader first text editor.
I love what this project promises. a properly accessible text editor, where all features work as they should with a screen reader, where everything is a few keystrokes away, I was bound to try it. But I was greatly disappointed with the result.
I first tested version 0.5. besides lacking many advertised features, it also had two glaring flaws. One is that control+tab didn’t switch to the next document, but instead indented the current line. Another one is that pressing control+z would select the whole document, which is not how undo works in any other text editor. I reported both these issues and got very short responses, first promising it will be fixed in a future release, and the second just claiming it couldn’t reproduce the bug. As it turned out the bug was already fixed on the master branch and I wasn’t aware the bug already got reported.
But somehow, things got even worse in quill 0.7. A bug got introduced which would be unforgiveable in any text editor. You couldn’t type any digits and some letters into your document because they would trigger editor actions. To be clear, the editor isn’t meant to work this way, this is some kind of bug in the implementation of the keymap.
These are sorts of bugs a developer would catch immediately if they just ran the program and typed any random text into a window. Nobody would release a new version of a program, not even a beta version, with such glaring flaws. Or so I thought, until I discovered this project.
To be clear, this isn’t a super early release, a private restricted beta, or a prototype. Quill is already full of various features, it’s publically advertised as a product, and so on. Not that it would have been acceptable if any of them were the case, you always, always make sure it works, and don’t release it until it does.
I’m not asking for perfection, I’m not even asking for good enough. just not utterly useless.
So to all vibe coders out there, please, please make sure it works.