#Javascript rich text editor code

The code bases for many of the editors often didn't expose the internal tooling that could have been re-used by developers, leading to having to reinvent the wheel.īuilding complex, nested documents was impossible. The repositories were monolithic, not small and reusable. Often the editor's internal representation of data made it impossible to use to for a realtime, collaborative editing use case without basically rewriting the editor. Most editors rolled their own views, instead of using existing technologies like React, so you have to learn a whole new system with new 'gotchas'.Ĭollaborative editing wasn't designed for in advance. Re-inventing the view layer seemed inefficient and limiting.

Simple things like transforming a document to HTML or Markdown involved writing lots of boilerplate code, for what seemed like very common use cases.

Writing as a user may have worked, but making programmatic changes, which is critical for building advanced behaviors, was needlessly complex. Transforming the documents programmatically was very convoluted. Things like bold and italic were supported out of the box, but what about comments, or embeds, or even more domain-specific needs? The editor's 'schema' was hardcoded and hard to customize. Slate lets you build rich, intuitive editors like those in Medium, Dropbox Paper or Google Docs-which are becoming table stakes for applications on the web-without your codebase getting mired in complexity. Slate - A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors.

Javascript rich text editor