4 ms·

Ah, the joy and horror of rich text editors. I completely understand the selling points and the attraction, but I gave up on 'm for my projects. Not saying that

Ah, the joy and horror of rich text editors. I completely understand the selling points and the attraction, but I gave up on 'm for my projects. Not saying that OP must do the same, though. I eventually settled for plain text in a simple textarea, with basic possibilities for markup by allowing Markdown. No more struggling with different browsers, no struggling with how the RTE looks and feels, no incompatibility issues with the underlying database, etc. Still not saying everybody has the same use case as I have (no code website system), but I wouldn't trade my current peace of mind for even the best looking RTE.

jamil7 5y ago
I try to argue for this approach as much as possible but it rarely gets through to product people.
- rambambram 5y ago
  A slick interface and the age old adage "don't make me think" are hard to argue with. ;)
earthboundkid 5y ago
Another opt-out route, which I am currently going down, is using Google Docs as an RTE and then just doing a good job of importing from it.
amelius 5y ago
> Ah, the joy and horror of rich text editors. The problem: there is no money to be made in writing software libraries these days, no matter how much a working solution is needed. So sadly, we're going to be stuck with all these suboptimal solutions for many years to come.
- rambambram 5y ago
  Maybe that's true. A lot of people tried the RTE stuff, and Basecamp/37Signals came close with a solution (I forgot the name). I guess it's a hard problem by definition, dealing with copypasted stuff from Word, dealing with browsers, etc. After using my simple Markdown solution for some years now, I came to appreciate the bare basic style of it. But it's not for every use case.
  - gopet3r 5y ago
    It‘s called Trix and I‘ve switched from Trix to TipTap because the whole plugin system works way better. And having the ability to process the document programmaticaly (TipTap = JSON, Trix = HTML) has opened a lot of possibilities for us.

jamil7 5y ago

I try to argue for this approach as much as possible but it rarely gets through to product people.

rambambram 5y ago
A slick interface and the age old adage "don't make me think" are hard to argue with. ;)

earthboundkid 5y ago

Another opt-out route, which I am currently going down, is using Google Docs as an RTE and then just doing a good job of importing from it.

amelius 5y ago

> Ah, the joy and horror of rich text editors. The problem: there is no money to be made in writing software libraries these days, no matter how much a working solution is needed. So sadly, we're going to be stuck with all these suboptimal solutions for many years to come.

rambambram 5y ago
Maybe that's true. A lot of people tried the RTE stuff, and Basecamp/37Signals came close with a solution (I forgot the name). I guess it's a hard problem by definition, dealing with copypasted stuff from Word, dealing with browsers, etc. After using my simple Markdown solution for some years now, I came to appreciate the bare basic style of it. But it's not for every use case.
- gopet3r 5y ago
  It‘s called Trix and I‘ve switched from Trix to TipTap because the whole plugin system works way better. And having the ability to process the document programmaticaly (TipTap = JSON, Trix = HTML) has opened a lot of possibilities for us.