Ed Sanders, Trevor and I had an in real life conversation, last Friday, where we spoke about the VisualEditor tablet (and future mobile) offering. We've had a bunch of issues with it so far breaking and a lot of this is due to two conflicting technologies.
We're keen to bring VE code and mobile code closer together with the ultimate goal to get a good VisualEditor mobile experience going.
Since Damon has asked us all to get VisualEditor released this quarter, between us we think mobile VE will become a high priority soon.
We'd thus like to spend this quarter making the VisualEditorOverlay [1] more OOJS UI like.
Ideally all the existing code should live in VisualEditor and be based on OOJS UI. In the future we could also imagine the wikitext editor in mobile becoming part of the VisualEditor tool itself.
At a bare minimum this could be rewritten as an OOJS UI dialog [2] and would require us looking at the mobile overlay manager and seeing if it can be consolidated with VisualEditor's seemingly similar window manager [3] which I do not believe has any support for storing state via the hash fragment [citation needed, please correct me]
As a result of this work, the mobile frontend code and VisualEditor's front end code should naturally become more aligned.
Ed, Trevor anything you would like to add to the above? Any corrections to my interpretation of this chat?
[1] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-MobileFrontend/blob/master... [2] https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/#!/api/OO.ui.Dialog [3] https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/#!/api/OO.ui.WindowManager