8 ms·

ProseMirror – A toolkit for building rich-text editors on the web

236 points by octosphere 8y ago

keb_ 8y ago
For those who don't know, this is by Marijn Haverbeke, developer of the great CodeMirror (in-browser code editor), and author of the even greater Eloquent JavaScript. https://codemirror.net/ https://codemirror.net/ https://eloquentjavascript.net/ https://eloquentjavascript.net/
- aerique 8y ago
  Let us not forget his Common Lisp work or his winning JS1K entry: https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/
squiggy22 8y ago
Of note - the Guardian engineering team have moved away from their custom RTE over to this https://www.theguardian.com/info/2019/jan/24/leaving-scribe https://www.theguardian.com/info/2019/jan/24/leaving-scribe
andreasscherman 8y ago
Worth mentioning about prosemirror is that it supports mobile devices fantastically, which I don't think can be said about _any_ of it competitors. Realised that far too late after investing in Draft.js, but migrated now to prosemirror and it truly works great. It does not contain a lot of helper functions (by choice), which can make it a bit difficult to get up and running if you're doing something non-standard.
- bbeausej 8y ago
  Quill JS also supports Android and mobile very well (https://quilljs.com/ https://quilljs.com/)
  - ergo14 8y ago
    Quill doesn't support modern standards like web components. But prosemirror works fine as far as I can tell.
    - ergo14 8y ago
      The issues: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/1472 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/1472 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2021 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2021 Hopefully this gets addressed soon.
- DougBTX 8y ago
  For Slate.js there's a PR to add Android support, looks like this is very hard to do well: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2062 https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2062
  - thesunny 8y ago
    Hello, I’m the individual submitting the PR. It is a hard nut to crack for sure and took over a solid month of work. If you are using React, Slate is IMO an excellent choice and the code quality/extensibility/community are great. I really appreciate DraftJS for coming out first and I contributed there as well, but Slate’s goals are overall better aligned to the needs of the community.
  - arciini 8y ago
    Having used Draft and Slate, Slate is definitely the choice to go with today if you want something built on top of React. Draft appears to be essentially somewhat unmaintained, whereas the Slate community has continued to be very active (thanks for the Android support! That's one reason we ended up using Quill for now) The built-in copy-paste handling is pretty messy to extend compared to Slate, where the system of normalizers works a lot better.
leeoniya 8y ago
in a similar vein: https://bustle.github.io/mobiledoc-kit/demo/ https://bustle.github.io/mobiledoc-kit/demo/
bananatron 8y ago
What a sick logo.
manigandham 8y ago
Time to bust out the big list of editors/frameworks: https://gist.github.com/manigandham/65543a0bc2bf7006a487 https://gist.github.com/manigandham/65543a0bc2bf7006a487
rafBM 8y ago
We are using and customizing ProseMirror exhaustively at Missive (https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/) Our rich text editor allows teams to collaboratively compose / review email drafts in real time. In our first version, we used Firepad because it provided collaborative editing somewhat effortlessly. You can imagine how people have very strict requirements regarding email and old habits anchored in other apps (Gmail, Outlook, to name a few). Here’s the one thing we hadn’t thought that made Firepad a deal breaker: spell checking. Firepad’s rendering does not use `contenteditable`, which makes browser-native spell checking impossible to provide. Big bummer for many people. We started searching for a contenteditable-based tool that supported collaborative editing. At the time, ProseMirror was the only candidate left after discarding Quill due to its overly simplistic document model (no nested lists nor multi-line quotes) and I believe this still holds true today. ProseMirror has actually come a long way to allow proper spell checking (see https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror/issues/390 https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror/issues/390). Marijn very kindly responded to feedback on this topic and ended up rewriting significant parts of ProseMirror to support it. I am extremely thankful for his dedication. We are very satisfied with ProseMirror as part of our stack. I don’t think any other editor library offers all the options we need. Thanks a ton Marijn!
- dman 8y ago
  Is Missive funding ProseMirror development at https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ ?
- wes-k 8y ago
  Ha! I’m the one who opened that ticket. I had implemented my own spell checker which was having some performance issues and was pleased to see ProseMirror works much better now with the browsers spell checker!
lewisjoe 8y ago
ProseMirror is easily the best source code I've ever worked with. The components are so well architected, that inside the codebase there's a 100 page book on software design principles waiting to come out. I'm serious. Marijn Haverbeke should certainly write a AOSA (http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html) style piece on how & why the software is architected in such way. What sets ProseMirror apart from the rest (Slate, Quill, Trix, Draft, etc.) is - ProseMirror isn't simply a library. It's an entire platform with all bits and pieces needed to build a simpler rich text library. Rightly named "toolkit" instead of a "library". Source: We are using it to build our soon-to-be-released rich text feature in comments for Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com)
- williamstein 8y ago
  Agreed. Many of the ideas in ProseMirror beautifully reflect many of the best modern trends in frontend web development (e.g., react).
  - Existenceblinks 8y ago
    Sorry, what are ideas it reflects, and what's best modern trends? Is React one of the best .. modern trends?
- dman 8y ago
  Is Zoho funding ProseMirror development at https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ ?
- xuejie 8y ago
  Interestingly, the platform design of ProseMirror is one of the key reason which drives me to Quill in one of my side projects. Don't get me wrong, if your goals mostly align with ProseMirror, it's a perfect tool, but if you want to deviate with ProseMirror in some aspects, the coupling design between different ProseMirror packages is actually a headache. On the other hand, Quill feels more like a simple library targeting exactly one use case. In addition, I feel that Quill's delta format [1] is much more elegant and easier to work with than ProseMirror's changeset [2], especially if your architecture uses a different language that's not JS. [1]: https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ [2]: https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-changeset https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-changeset
arciini 8y ago
I've recently been building an editor and considered Slate and briefly used Draft (both built on top of React). We ended up using Quill. If any of you have used Quill and Prosemirror, what were your impressions of the differences between the two? Here's what I've observed so far: 1. DraftJS (React) works on desktop, but has no plans for collaborative editing, mobile support, and limited development. We found it hard to extend the paste handling for custom behaviours too. On the other hand, there are a lot of nice libraries built around it (we used medium-draft) 2. Slate (React) is definitely the way to go for React developers who don't yet need mobile support. It's mature and has a good community of developers. The one downside is that some of the popular plugins lost compatibility with the latest version of Slate, and some plugin maintainers (notably Gitbooks) have decided to stop tracking the mainline releases [1] 3. Quill (non-React) seems very mature with a good ecosystem of plugins. Instead of relying on React Components, it relies on there being a strict mapping between the DOM and the model that you build. The "model" is the DOM, so-to-speak, but with heavy restrictions to avoid ContentEditable issues. We've found it to be very mature, and it's the only one of the 3 we've found to have great mobile and collaborative-editing support out of the box. That was important for us, so we ended up using it today (1) https://github.com/GitbookIO/slate-edit-list https://github.com/GitbookIO/slate-edit-list
- lewisjoe 8y ago
  I've briefly analysed ProseMirror as well as Quill. IMO ProseMirror seemed well built with better literature compared to Quill. ProseMirror's author has truly thought out every API and has got most of the details just right. For example, if I ought to build a grammar checker on top of Quill vs ProseMirror, I couldn't find any APIs in Quill that lets us decorate the view with grammar errors and suggestions, without polluting the core data-model with custom nodes/attributes. ProseMirror on the other hand had the concept of Decorators (https://prosemirror.net/docs/ref/#view.Decorations https://prosemirror.net/docs/ref/#view.Decorations) for such a case. That was just one example. More from the author of Quill himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468402
- thesunny 8y ago
  With respect to Slate, I've got a PR for mobile that works with Android 8 and 9. Will add 7 support later. I just noticed the problem with the Gitbook plugins and have put up an issue. My hope is to have a de-forked version in mainline either officially or semi-officially supported. Android is happening. The plugins issue is hopefully something we can resolve...
james_in_the_uk 8y ago
From no more than the 15 comments posted I'm able to establish that: 1. This component is very high quality and already in use by major businesses: New York Times, The Guardian, Zoho... 2. This component is shepherded by a developer who is very well regarded in the open source community. 3. That developer has only received ~ 50% of his monthly target of Eur 5k. Something doesn't add up.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  It's typical for small open source teams. It's hard to make money with open source. My suggestion wold be to use AGPLv3 license and sell commercial licenses to improve the income situation.
  - Investogician 8y ago
    For a front-end library like this, wouldn't regular GPLv3 do the same thing? I thought AGPL was mainly for server stuff.
    - pookeh 8y ago
      You can have a GPL-licensed SaaS that charges you for stuff
  - throw2016 8y ago
    Amazon, Google and hundreds of others show otherwise. They have tens of billions of dollars in revenue from open source. Open source is probably supporting revenue in the hundreds of billions now. However without closing the gap between the creators and monetizers this model can't sustain itself and the party will eventually crash.
    - Nokinside 8y ago
      As I said, I was referring to small companies. Amazon or Google don't open source the main software they use make money from. Only supporting infrastructure software and research. For a small company it's possible to open source the main product if you use GPL or AGPL.
burtonator 8y ago
I did a huge deep dive of rich text editors for web HTML recently when I was building Polar https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar is a document management platform which support rich annotations around your documents including reading progress. Comments, flashcards, etc. Rich text / HTML was a big requirement. I also wanted advanced features like mathematics / latex and pasting of HTML from your existing tools. I actually ended up using Summernote: https://summernote.org/ https://summernote.org/ which was interesting as it's a bit older and not actively developed as much as the alternatives. I think the big deciding factor for me was that it handled rich pasting better than all other platforms. I can copy from my editor (IntelliJ) and paste into it and the format is preserved perfectly. With other systems this didn't work. The BIG downside though is the size. It's huge and requires jquery (which is also huge). I think what I'm going to do is bifurcate my app into two parts. The basic app is setup to load quickly and then the resources for the annotation come 1-2 seconds later. Most people read for a bit before they're ready to start working with the document. This give me time to download things in the background. I just tested the above scenario (copy from my editor) and pasted into prosemirror and it couldn't handle it. In fact nothing happened. I wish there was a CLEARLY obvious winner here but we're still all over the map in terms of functionality and feature set.
- lewisjoe 8y ago
  > I think the big deciding factor for me was that it handled rich pasting better than all other platforms. I can copy from my editor (IntelliJ) and paste into it and the format is preserved perfectly. I guess you are looking for a fully packed editor that preserves as much formatting as possible when pasted. ProseMirror can do that. But for that, you have to first configure ProseMirror (by adding necessary schema info) to make it understand background colour, font colour and other such formatting that doesn't come by default. That is probably why, it might have _seemed_ like ProseMirror couldn't handle the paste.
  - bigmanwalter 8y ago
    After a few days of configuring ProseMirror I was nowhere close to having a usable editor. It's not for the feint of heart.
QML 8y ago
Anyone know if it's possible to give Markdown and LaTeX first-class support in ProseMirror? Having only regex-based shortcuts does not achieve that. What I mean is if you typed bold, let it turn into a bolded word, and then decide to edit the word itself, it should be surrounded by bold again instead of defaulting to ctrl-b due to content-editable. The same goes for LaTeX with $$ decorators. I find this more natural when writing with Markdown and LaTeX than having to click the menu bar and inserting a math formula or whatnot. I think the best editor I found so far that does this is Typora, but that library is not open-source. There is an open-source library very close to it called Marktext, but that has a few annoying bugs and only has 1-2 developers. So I'm wondering if ProseMirror is the mature library for me? Edit: Ok, HackerNews only renders italtics which makes writing a bit annoying. The bold was initially surrounded by two * on both sides.
- eslaught 8y ago
  Frankly, I have yet to find a good Markdown editor period, regardless of whether it's open/closed source or whatever. As far as I know all the Markdown editors I'm aware of only support subsets of the syntax in e.g. Pandoc, so I keep hitting edge cases where my document won't render properly. In the better editors, they at least don't mess with the parts of the document they don't understand, so you can edit with (relative) safety as long as you don't need to touch the unsupported sections. But some editors, the process of loading/saving isn't lossless, so you can't even edit such documents. The editor from texts.io is a big offender here. I just took Typora out for a spin, and it looks pretty good except it doesn't understand soft line wrapping. So if you have a document with something like: Some paragraph text 6. that happens to be broken with a number in front. Then it interrupts the paragraph and makes a list. But at least in my initial tests it seems to be lossless, so it at least won't mess with existing formatting too badly.
  - QML 8y ago
    Yeah, Typora is still in beta last time I checked so minor issues like that are expected. Just open up an issue on their Github issue page. Hm, for me Pandoc has worked pretty well for converting .md to .html. Is it the specific flavor of Markdown that you are using (I use Github flavored Markdown)?
pier25 8y ago
I had to choose a rich text library for developing a in house editor with custom blocks (latex, interactive activities, images, etc). I tried ProseMirror for a week and while I think it's super elegant, architecturally speaking, it's very low level and not for the faint of heart. Another factor (which might be a pro or a con depending on your use case) is that ProseMirror is completely agnostic at the view level. This forces you do a lot of stuff unless you find a wrapper like TipTap for Vue. After trying a couple of options I ended up using Slate. It's for React which means the integration with the view layer is already solved for you. The bad thing about Slate is that it's still a work in progress. For example the project is undergoing a massive rewrite removing immutable.js: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2345 https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2345 My experience with Slate has been great. I'm much more productive than with ProseMirror, but OTOH I'm not very happy that sometime in the near future I will have to do a big rewrite. It's completely my fault for build something with a unfinished library though.
- jorde 8y ago
  I forked Tiptap for React and Typescript with a bunch of additions. Haven't open sourced it just yet but if you're curious giving it a try, hit me up (email in profile)
  - Findeton 8y ago
    I don't see your email, but I'm interested!
devwastaken 8y ago
As cool as editors in web browsers are, they really don't match up to the expectations of what an editor can already do in something like Microsoft word. Rich-text has been done to death, and is only useable in cases where content input is heavily guided. I would like to see at the least images being able to be easily moved around, resized, and format with existing content.
Swalden123 8y ago
This looks promising! I’ve been hacking code mirror to try to do what ProseMirror is doing with Markdown. I might have to check out using ProseMirror in my notebook app.
mkl 8y ago
Can this be used offline? E.g. sync for collaboration when reconnected.
wes-k 8y ago
Built out our editor on it with a handful of customizations: https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team-welcome-wiki https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team-welcome-wiki This is THE toolkit if you want power and flexibility when building out your editor!

236 points by octosphere 8y ago

keb_ 8y ago

For those who don't know, this is by Marijn Haverbeke, developer of the great CodeMirror (in-browser code editor), and author of the even greater Eloquent JavaScript. https://codemirror.net/ https://codemirror.net/ https://eloquentjavascript.net/ https://eloquentjavascript.net/

aerique 8y ago
Let us not forget his Common Lisp work or his winning JS1K entry: https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/

squiggy22 8y ago

Of note - the Guardian engineering team have moved away from their custom RTE over to this https://www.theguardian.com/info/2019/jan/24/leaving-scribe https://www.theguardian.com/info/2019/jan/24/leaving-scribe

andreasscherman 8y ago

Worth mentioning about prosemirror is that it supports mobile devices fantastically, which I don't think can be said about _any_ of it competitors. Realised that far too late after investing in Draft.js, but migrated now to prosemirror and it truly works great. It does not contain a lot of helper functions (by choice), which can make it a bit difficult to get up and running if you're doing something non-standard.

bbeausej 8y ago
Quill JS also supports Android and mobile very well (https://quilljs.com/ https://quilljs.com/)
- ergo14 8y ago
  Quill doesn't support modern standards like web components. But prosemirror works fine as far as I can tell.
  - ergo14 8y ago
    The issues: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/1472 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/1472 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2021 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2021 Hopefully this gets addressed soon.
DougBTX 8y ago
For Slate.js there's a PR to add Android support, looks like this is very hard to do well: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2062 https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2062
- thesunny 8y ago
  Hello, I’m the individual submitting the PR. It is a hard nut to crack for sure and took over a solid month of work. If you are using React, Slate is IMO an excellent choice and the code quality/extensibility/community are great. I really appreciate DraftJS for coming out first and I contributed there as well, but Slate’s goals are overall better aligned to the needs of the community.
- arciini 8y ago
  Having used Draft and Slate, Slate is definitely the choice to go with today if you want something built on top of React. Draft appears to be essentially somewhat unmaintained, whereas the Slate community has continued to be very active (thanks for the Android support! That's one reason we ended up using Quill for now) The built-in copy-paste handling is pretty messy to extend compared to Slate, where the system of normalizers works a lot better.

leeoniya 8y ago

in a similar vein: https://bustle.github.io/mobiledoc-kit/demo/ https://bustle.github.io/mobiledoc-kit/demo/

bananatron 8y ago

What a sick logo.

manigandham 8y ago

Time to bust out the big list of editors/frameworks: https://gist.github.com/manigandham/65543a0bc2bf7006a487 https://gist.github.com/manigandham/65543a0bc2bf7006a487

rafBM 8y ago

We are using and customizing ProseMirror exhaustively at Missive (https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/) Our rich text editor allows teams to collaboratively compose / review email drafts in real time. In our first version, we used Firepad because it provided collaborative editing somewhat effortlessly. You can imagine how people have very strict requirements regarding email and old habits anchored in other apps (Gmail, Outlook, to name a few). Here’s the one thing we hadn’t thought that made Firepad a deal breaker: spell checking. Firepad’s rendering does not use `contenteditable`, which makes browser-native spell checking impossible to provide. Big bummer for many people. We started searching for a contenteditable-based tool that supported collaborative editing. At the time, ProseMirror was the only candidate left after discarding Quill due to its overly simplistic document model (no nested lists nor multi-line quotes) and I believe this still holds true today. ProseMirror has actually come a long way to allow proper spell checking (see https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror/issues/390 https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror/issues/390). Marijn very kindly responded to feedback on this topic and ended up rewriting significant parts of ProseMirror to support it. I am extremely thankful for his dedication. We are very satisfied with ProseMirror as part of our stack. I don’t think any other editor library offers all the options we need. Thanks a ton Marijn!

dman 8y ago
Is Missive funding ProseMirror development at https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ ?
wes-k 8y ago
Ha! I’m the one who opened that ticket. I had implemented my own spell checker which was having some performance issues and was pleased to see ProseMirror works much better now with the browsers spell checker!

lewisjoe 8y ago

ProseMirror is easily the best source code I've ever worked with. The components are so well architected, that inside the codebase there's a 100 page book on software design principles waiting to come out. I'm serious. Marijn Haverbeke should certainly write a AOSA (http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html) style piece on how & why the software is architected in such way. What sets ProseMirror apart from the rest (Slate, Quill, Trix, Draft, etc.) is - ProseMirror isn't simply a library. It's an entire platform with all bits and pieces needed to build a simpler rich text library. Rightly named "toolkit" instead of a "library". Source: We are using it to build our soon-to-be-released rich text feature in comments for Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com)

williamstein 8y ago
Agreed. Many of the ideas in ProseMirror beautifully reflect many of the best modern trends in frontend web development (e.g., react).
- Existenceblinks 8y ago
  Sorry, what are ideas it reflects, and what's best modern trends? Is React one of the best .. modern trends?
dman 8y ago
Is Zoho funding ProseMirror development at https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ ?
xuejie 8y ago
Interestingly, the platform design of ProseMirror is one of the key reason which drives me to Quill in one of my side projects. Don't get me wrong, if your goals mostly align with ProseMirror, it's a perfect tool, but if you want to deviate with ProseMirror in some aspects, the coupling design between different ProseMirror packages is actually a headache. On the other hand, Quill feels more like a simple library targeting exactly one use case. In addition, I feel that Quill's delta format [1] is much more elegant and easier to work with than ProseMirror's changeset [2], especially if your architecture uses a different language that's not JS. [1]: https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ https://quilljs.com/docs/delta/ [2]: https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-changeset https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-changeset

arciini 8y ago

I've recently been building an editor and considered Slate and briefly used Draft (both built on top of React). We ended up using Quill. If any of you have used Quill and Prosemirror, what were your impressions of the differences between the two? Here's what I've observed so far: 1. DraftJS (React) works on desktop, but has no plans for collaborative editing, mobile support, and limited development. We found it hard to extend the paste handling for custom behaviours too. On the other hand, there are a lot of nice libraries built around it (we used medium-draft) 2. Slate (React) is definitely the way to go for React developers who don't yet need mobile support. It's mature and has a good community of developers. The one downside is that some of the popular plugins lost compatibility with the latest version of Slate, and some plugin maintainers (notably Gitbooks) have decided to stop tracking the mainline releases [1] 3. Quill (non-React) seems very mature with a good ecosystem of plugins. Instead of relying on React Components, it relies on there being a strict mapping between the DOM and the model that you build. The "model" is the DOM, so-to-speak, but with heavy restrictions to avoid ContentEditable issues. We've found it to be very mature, and it's the only one of the 3 we've found to have great mobile and collaborative-editing support out of the box. That was important for us, so we ended up using it today (1) https://github.com/GitbookIO/slate-edit-list https://github.com/GitbookIO/slate-edit-list

lewisjoe 8y ago
I've briefly analysed ProseMirror as well as Quill. IMO ProseMirror seemed well built with better literature compared to Quill. ProseMirror's author has truly thought out every API and has got most of the details just right. For example, if I ought to build a grammar checker on top of Quill vs ProseMirror, I couldn't find any APIs in Quill that lets us decorate the view with grammar errors and suggestions, without polluting the core data-model with custom nodes/attributes. ProseMirror on the other hand had the concept of Decorators (https://prosemirror.net/docs/ref/#view.Decorations https://prosemirror.net/docs/ref/#view.Decorations) for such a case. That was just one example. More from the author of Quill himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468402
thesunny 8y ago
With respect to Slate, I've got a PR for mobile that works with Android 8 and 9. Will add 7 support later. I just noticed the problem with the Gitbook plugins and have put up an issue. My hope is to have a de-forked version in mainline either officially or semi-officially supported. Android is happening. The plugins issue is hopefully something we can resolve...

james_in_the_uk 8y ago

From no more than the 15 comments posted I'm able to establish that: 1. This component is very high quality and already in use by major businesses: New York Times, The Guardian, Zoho... 2. This component is shepherded by a developer who is very well regarded in the open source community. 3. That developer has only received ~ 50% of his monthly target of Eur 5k. Something doesn't add up.

Nokinside 8y ago
It's typical for small open source teams. It's hard to make money with open source. My suggestion wold be to use AGPLv3 license and sell commercial licenses to improve the income situation.
- Investogician 8y ago
  For a front-end library like this, wouldn't regular GPLv3 do the same thing? I thought AGPL was mainly for server stuff.
  - pookeh 8y ago
    You can have a GPL-licensed SaaS that charges you for stuff
- throw2016 8y ago
  Amazon, Google and hundreds of others show otherwise. They have tens of billions of dollars in revenue from open source. Open source is probably supporting revenue in the hundreds of billions now. However without closing the gap between the creators and monetizers this model can't sustain itself and the party will eventually crash.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    As I said, I was referring to small companies. Amazon or Google don't open source the main software they use make money from. Only supporting infrastructure software and research. For a small company it's possible to open source the main product if you use GPL or AGPL.

burtonator 8y ago

I did a huge deep dive of rich text editors for web HTML recently when I was building Polar https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar is a document management platform which support rich annotations around your documents including reading progress. Comments, flashcards, etc. Rich text / HTML was a big requirement. I also wanted advanced features like mathematics / latex and pasting of HTML from your existing tools. I actually ended up using Summernote: https://summernote.org/ https://summernote.org/ which was interesting as it's a bit older and not actively developed as much as the alternatives. I think the big deciding factor for me was that it handled rich pasting better than all other platforms. I can copy from my editor (IntelliJ) and paste into it and the format is preserved perfectly. With other systems this didn't work. The BIG downside though is the size. It's huge and requires jquery (which is also huge). I think what I'm going to do is bifurcate my app into two parts. The basic app is setup to load quickly and then the resources for the annotation come 1-2 seconds later. Most people read for a bit before they're ready to start working with the document. This give me time to download things in the background. I just tested the above scenario (copy from my editor) and pasted into prosemirror and it couldn't handle it. In fact nothing happened. I wish there was a CLEARLY obvious winner here but we're still all over the map in terms of functionality and feature set.

lewisjoe 8y ago
> I think the big deciding factor for me was that it handled rich pasting better than all other platforms. I can copy from my editor (IntelliJ) and paste into it and the format is preserved perfectly. I guess you are looking for a fully packed editor that preserves as much formatting as possible when pasted. ProseMirror can do that. But for that, you have to first configure ProseMirror (by adding necessary schema info) to make it understand background colour, font colour and other such formatting that doesn't come by default. That is probably why, it might have _seemed_ like ProseMirror couldn't handle the paste.
- bigmanwalter 8y ago
  After a few days of configuring ProseMirror I was nowhere close to having a usable editor. It's not for the feint of heart.

QML 8y ago

Anyone know if it's possible to give Markdown and LaTeX first-class support in ProseMirror? Having only regex-based shortcuts does not achieve that. What I mean is if you typed bold, let it turn into a bolded word, and then decide to edit the word itself, it should be surrounded by bold again instead of defaulting to ctrl-b due to content-editable. The same goes for LaTeX with $$ decorators. I find this more natural when writing with Markdown and LaTeX than having to click the menu bar and inserting a math formula or whatnot. I think the best editor I found so far that does this is Typora, but that library is not open-source. There is an open-source library very close to it called Marktext, but that has a few annoying bugs and only has 1-2 developers. So I'm wondering if ProseMirror is the mature library for me? Edit: Ok, HackerNews only renders italtics which makes writing a bit annoying. The bold was initially surrounded by two * on both sides.

eslaught 8y ago
Frankly, I have yet to find a good Markdown editor period, regardless of whether it's open/closed source or whatever. As far as I know all the Markdown editors I'm aware of only support subsets of the syntax in e.g. Pandoc, so I keep hitting edge cases where my document won't render properly. In the better editors, they at least don't mess with the parts of the document they don't understand, so you can edit with (relative) safety as long as you don't need to touch the unsupported sections. But some editors, the process of loading/saving isn't lossless, so you can't even edit such documents. The editor from texts.io is a big offender here. I just took Typora out for a spin, and it looks pretty good except it doesn't understand soft line wrapping. So if you have a document with something like: Some paragraph text 6. that happens to be broken with a number in front. Then it interrupts the paragraph and makes a list. But at least in my initial tests it seems to be lossless, so it at least won't mess with existing formatting too badly.
- QML 8y ago
  Yeah, Typora is still in beta last time I checked so minor issues like that are expected. Just open up an issue on their Github issue page. Hm, for me Pandoc has worked pretty well for converting .md to .html. Is it the specific flavor of Markdown that you are using (I use Github flavored Markdown)?

pier25 8y ago

I had to choose a rich text library for developing a in house editor with custom blocks (latex, interactive activities, images, etc). I tried ProseMirror for a week and while I think it's super elegant, architecturally speaking, it's very low level and not for the faint of heart. Another factor (which might be a pro or a con depending on your use case) is that ProseMirror is completely agnostic at the view level. This forces you do a lot of stuff unless you find a wrapper like TipTap for Vue. After trying a couple of options I ended up using Slate. It's for React which means the integration with the view layer is already solved for you. The bad thing about Slate is that it's still a work in progress. For example the project is undergoing a massive rewrite removing immutable.js: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2345 https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2345 My experience with Slate has been great. I'm much more productive than with ProseMirror, but OTOH I'm not very happy that sometime in the near future I will have to do a big rewrite. It's completely my fault for build something with a unfinished library though.

jorde 8y ago
I forked Tiptap for React and Typescript with a bunch of additions. Haven't open sourced it just yet but if you're curious giving it a try, hit me up (email in profile)
- Findeton 8y ago
  I don't see your email, but I'm interested!

devwastaken 8y ago

As cool as editors in web browsers are, they really don't match up to the expectations of what an editor can already do in something like Microsoft word. Rich-text has been done to death, and is only useable in cases where content input is heavily guided. I would like to see at the least images being able to be easily moved around, resized, and format with existing content.

Swalden123 8y ago

This looks promising! I’ve been hacking code mirror to try to do what ProseMirror is doing with Markdown. I might have to check out using ProseMirror in my notebook app.

mkl 8y ago

Can this be used offline? E.g. sync for collaboration when reconnected.

wes-k 8y ago

Built out our editor on it with a handful of customizations: https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team-welcome-wiki https://www.wikiful.com/@demo/dev-team-welcome-wiki This is THE toolkit if you want power and flexibility when building out your editor!