Block-based editor

Added 23 Jun 2025 · Last updated 9 Jul 2026

The composition of structured content from modular blocks, balancing the fluidity of prose with the precision of structured data.

Adding blocks

Whichever way it’s triggered, the menu opens right where the current actor’s focus is. There’s no need to say where, so picking a block and placing it are one gesture.

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Slash commands

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Passing to LLM

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References

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Contextual actions

Select block(s) or text spans and invoke LLM from contextual menu.

Co-editing & attribution

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Consequences

each block carries only as much structure as currently serves it, gained or shed in place, so formalising is local and reversible instead of a commitment made before the work starts
the block is now the unit of everything the surface does — selecting, referencing, moving, commenting — so anything that addresses content addresses blocks, whether or not that matches how the actor thinks of what they wrote
every position in the document is a place where anything could go next, which puts the weight on saying what without having to say where

Appears in

Making changes

Selecting what to change and where to change it, step 2 — within Let the actor change the item where it is shown: the same blocks are used for reading and editing, with no separate mode for either

Related patterns

Enables

Selection — the surface in which content selection happens

Hosts

AI completion — the block editor is a natural container for AI completion

Enacts

Formality — incremental formalisation — content carries only as much structure as currently serves, gained or shed in place, optional and reversible

Related to

Editing in place — the block editor assumes this move — reading and changing happen on the same blocks, with no separate state for either

Enabled by

Command menu — picking a block and placing it; summoned at the current position

To-do

This page currently compresses a broader territory. A possible split:

What stays here, the page’s own core: composition from uniform, freely recombinable units. The block’s sameness is what makes juxtaposition, nesting, and rearrangement cheap — anything can sit beside, inside, or above anything, and rearranging commits to nothing. This fluidity is the move; name the pattern from it.
Incremental formalisation — the move enacting formality: content carries only as much structure as currently serves, gaining or shedding it in place without re-entry. The system recognises implicit structure and offers it; the actor accepts, defers, or ignores — structure stays optional and reversible, not a ladder to climb. Type-switching over persistent data (prose ↔ table ↔ board) is its block-editor instance.
Block reference / transclusion — the seed behind the References section above. Its centre is knowable multiplicity — visible provenance and ripple scope — not syncing mechanics.
A substrate / computational medium foundation — the workspace-as-document design material that this page’s move instantiates.
Rename this page by its move when decomposing: “block-based” is occupied by the visual-programming corpus, so the head term should change; the component doc keeps the name.
Scope boundary: this page is flow-scoped (blocks in sequence, caret as anchor). Canvas composition (units in space, pointer as anchor) shares the genus — free recombination, position-as-operand, structure recognised from arrangement (spatial hypertext’s home turf) — but carries implicit structure differently (metric adjacency vs ordinal) and neighbours pan-and-zoom / semantic-zoom / focus-and-context. Decide sibling-vs-variant at decomposition time.

pattern playground