ouch.. the way that links and mentions are created is really hacky and i agree its not great.. i think i'll have to write my own plugin to make the links and mentions. i'm currently using a premade thing that does it fairly well but making my own could be fun.
Yeah, I looked in you're source code and saw you were using Tailwind! I'd never heard it be fore but it looks awesome and I'll probably use it. Even if you just made the links a different colour when they were in the mentions, that would be great.
the source code on GitHub is for a technically different site, but yeah both are tailwind. the issue is that the editor outputs html, which gets sanitized client side. somewhere in that process, urls have to be made into links and mentions have to be made into mentions, but it's really hard to do it well.