Ask HN: What is your favorite FOSS WYSIWYG editor?

There isn't one.

This space has a lot of churn; a hot new project is started by a dev who claims they'll finally have "the solution" for the WYSIWYG space. Then it gets dropped after a few years. In fact many of the comments are listing archived projects no longer under development.

This is an unfortunate drawback to truly free software. The only two WYSIWYG editors I can recommend are OSS but have premium plans and premium plugins. However even their free plans are more capable than most other options. Corporate backing has upsides.

I would try TinyMCE. The docs are okay and it is a true WYSIWYG. If you're ready for the learning curve, and want to make something with virtually unlimited capabilities, CKeditor cannot be beat. The CKeditor model is a subtle abstraction you don't notice is there, unless you need it in which case it's very powerful. The documentation is incredible. The pre-built editors and plugins cover many use cases.

Recently built a content driven rails site and chose CKeditor and would recommend it as well.

In my experience using CKeditor in Moodle, CKeditor generates invalid HTML (especially around lists) and sometimes bad HTML that does weird things like insert random spans and hardcode font sizes. I still prefer it over TinyMCE, another Moodle option, but I can't trust it to do the right thing.

> atleast I need to be as useful as wordpress article editor

The WordPress article editor (Gutenberg) is FOSS, so you could just use that in your project. That's definitely at least as useful as the WordPress article editor! ;)

This doesn't exactly answer the question, but as someone who's done web stuff for years and who is an extreme fan of the GPL, nevertheless I end up using stuff like Divi and Elementor under Wordpress.

This, to me, is where the "paying for software that isn't free in either sense" has finally reached a fair equilibrium? Which is to say, thanks to the free-ness of the underlying platform -- it seems absolutely equitable to be like, "dig in and use the free but more difficult stuff that's out there, or just drop some money on this pay stuff (which you're also still generally free to hack with.)

I don't think very much software under "you can't have it unless you pay for it" is very good, but this is an exception.