Slate v2 range refs must be transaction-aware and default inward

What happened

The next seam after the projection proof was durable annotation anchors.

The tempting shortcut was obvious:

• port legacy rangeRef
• let it update eagerly on every op
• keep the old default affinity

That would have been wrong twice.

What fixed it

The first honest v2 cut worked only after two decisions:

1. range refs became transaction-aware
2. default affinity became inward

Transaction awareness matters because slate-v2 already treats draft mutation as private. If ref objects update eagerly while editor.children still points at the previous committed snapshot, refs and document state drift out of alignment.

The fix was:

• keep live refs in editor-side runtime state
• clone draft ref values at transaction start
• transform draft ref values as ops apply
• publish ref.current only at commit
• drop invalidated refs cleanly on commit or unref()

Why inward won

Legacy Slate defaults rangeRef() to forward, even though Range.transform() itself defaults to inward.

For persistent annotation anchors, forward is the wrong default.

inward is better because insertions at the range boundary do not casually expand the anchored span. That matches the actual goal:

• keep pointing at the original content
• do not absorb adjacent edits unless explicitly requested

Reusable rule

For Slate v2 durable anchors:

• refs live in runtime state, not snapshots
• refs transform in the transaction draft, not directly in committed state
• inward is the sane default for annotation-style range refs

If a ref design breaks commit alignment or defaults to boundary expansion for no good reason, it is carrying legacy baggage instead of solving the v2 problem.