Post

TIL about your `pampa` project — I love seeing more projects adopting approaches from Pandoc, and especially building tools that make Pandoc AST manipulation more performant and easier to embed in other projects. Thanks!

bro didn't quarto 1 just get released yesterday and now we're on to quarto 2 already,,,, sheesh time flies lmao

Very exciting. Quarto is a wonderful tool and I really like where you’re headed with version 2. Continuing work on Marimo integration would be great to see, if possible. Is there anywhere to donate to the projec?

This looks fantastic! My genuine question is: when/how does the team learn all these skills? i.e. all the languages and technologies related to quarto? Seems remarkable!

Quarto 2 is rewritten from the ground up in Rust. The performance-critical parts of the system are now entirely in a single source tree, which will give you much faster Markdown processing, as well with more thorough tooling support like error messages, lints, and completion. (2/)

Because the main code base is now fully in Rust, we can compile it to WebAssembly, and use it to drive a web-based collaborative writing system. This is based on www.automerge.org, and will have both open-source and commercial hosted versions. (3/)

We also figured out how to make the processing pipeline "bidirectional", allowing rich editors to conveniently and minimally change the .qmd source in editor environments. This will bring a number of new affordances that aren't demoable yet, but we think you'll truly love. (4/)

Nice! I hooe the apis for this will be exposed, I myself and I am sure many others will want to build quarto and native .qmd support into many things (obsidian, web, anything electron, maybe even into agentic coding gui’s?)

Finally, Quarto 2 will take some time to cook; don't expect a release for at least 6 months. Quarto 1, in the meantime, continues under development, and Quarto 2 lives in a separate repo: github.com/quarto-dev/q2 We'll have individual posts about all of the new tech coming up. Stay tuned! (5/5)

These are amazing changes!! Collaborative editing is the number one thing that occasionally sends my team back to Google Docs, and of course the speed of Rust goes without saying. Cannot wait!!

Superb! Regarding collaborative editing, given that lots of Quarto documents rely on executing code to produce outputs, how do you envision this will work? Will collaborative writing require setting up a data-analysis environment with the ability to execute e.g. R code on some cloud platform?

We have a few different plans, and are currently experimenting with them. Nothing to share so far, but we’ll post updates as we build it out.