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Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

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Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#21

Post by HatchedLake721 »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #13
hanspagel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are editors that handle images very well by default, like Quill or Trix. If you start diving deeper you’ll find out that image handling is just super complex and the behaviour is dependant on what you’re building. Then you’ll be happy to have full control about the behaviour with editors like Slate, ProseMirror or Tiptap.

Just wanted to note to those thinking of using it: beware of Quill. I used it for my project, but it was not made for saving and then displaying the rich text. At least for me, it was a hassle figuring out how to accomplish this.

I’ve started using quill recently (for users to write, save and then display). I’m just rendering the saved structure and disable the editor parts for “display”. I’m happy with it

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#22

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

emptysea wrote: post #18
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience here. They changed APIs with no warning at version 0.46, breaking whatever spotty iOS/Android support they had. That’s not a knock against them: mobile contentEditable is terribly difficult to get right. But the surprise total deprecation of their stable branch was uncool to say the least, even if they did warn the software was beta. I heard Slate raised money to fix Android support, but whether or no…

Never seen tiptip before, looks pretty slick. At work we need only the most basic customization (some inline spans for template vars) and we've cobbled together a Draft.JS implementation that's pretty buggy and has random runtime errors (unhandled nulls internal to the Draft.JS code).

Yes, I looked at TipTap for a while recently and the API looks like a really nice layer on top of ProseMirror.

Draft.js was another far out experience for me. I built the first attempt at my app with it, only to discover that Draft.js didn't work on Android. It was buggy on iOS, but on Android just didn't work. If you've been using Draft.js you probably remember Android support landing with the huge PR from Fabio M. Costa at GoDaddy[0], but by then I had already decided I needed to find something else. That PR actually led me to ProseMirror:

> This approach is the one used by Prosemirror (see https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-view/blob/master/...), which is the only Rich Text Editor I've tried that works well on Android. [1]

When I looked at ProseMirror, I was spooked by the apparent complexity. Tried Quill, Trix (worked great, but uncustomizable) and then went with Slate, only to have the above-mentioned experience. Remembered that comment on the PR, and redid my editor in ProseMirror, which finally was something that worked. Thank you Marijn and the ProseMirror community. It's been a journey with these editors.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/pull/2035

[1] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/pull/2035#issue-2613622...

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#23

Post by williamstein »

jitl wrote: post #19

The recent changes to the API in 0.50 look good. The number of iteration passes really shows. Out of the available open source editor frameworks, Slate is probably most similar to Notion’s internal editor system. If I had to rebuild on a framework tomorrow, it’d be Slate or ProseMirror. Still if I used Slate it would be with the expectation that I’d end up owning an aging fork of a forgotten version at some point.

I've been using Slate heavily this year. I'm not a Slate developer, but I've read a lot of the source code, follow all the Github issues, etc., and I'm "owning an aging fork". As far as I can tell, the API instability mentioned elsehwere in this thread resulted from a nearly complete rewrite (inspired by immerjs) that launched in May 2020; for over a year since then, the API has been very stable, mainly because Ian Taylor, who wrote most of Slate, seems to have moved on to other projects (see https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/graphs/contributors)... there's still a lot of work on Slate, but it's mainly by other people who are trying to preserve the vision that Ian laid out. I ended up forking only the React part of Slate, which is officially a plugin, and massively rewriting it to support virtualized windowing, so we can work with very large possibly complicated to render documents. I also added fairly generic realtime collaboration support. This is currently used in https://cocalc.com for WYSIWYG editing of Markdown documents. I also have plans to extend my use of Slate with windowing to Jupyter notebooks and other document types.

I chose Slate over Prosemirror because the source code of Slate is Typescript written in a clear modern style, and I was able to start reading any part of it and understand it easily, whereas I find Prosemirror's core source code more difficult (this may just be a reflection of my shortcomings). I spent a lot of time initially just reading Slate PR's claiming to fix bugs, then integrating the PR's into my fork, often in a way that makes sense for my project, but likely wouldn't in general (I left helpful remarks on Github).

Slate is an interesting project, and it is comparable to Prosemirror. However, development is structured very differently at present, and I think there's little funding behind Slate, whereas the author of Prosemirror seems to have done a good job encouraging sustainable donations. I think Ian Taylor, who mainly wrote Slate, also cofounded a company called Segment.io, which is a serious startup that was recently sold to Twilio, so I don't know what his motivations are.

I have no plans to switch from Slate to Prosemirror. Getting virtualized windowing to work with Slate was quite difficult, but it's really table stakes for what I plan on doing longterm, and I don't even know where to begin to do virtualized windowing in Prosemirror.

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#24

Post by williamstein »

otrahuevada wrote: post #2

Been looking for something like this but minus React for _ages_. I'd like our users to build their own RTE according to their needs, having a common data model on every one of them. Is there such a thing out there?

Slate is architected so everything that actually involves React is in a separate plugin called "slate-react". As explained here https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate#packages there's a package called "slate" that's "Slate's core data model logic.", and there's another package called slate-react that is "React components for rendering Slate editors.". For example, I just searched npm and quicly found "slate-vue" (https://www.npmjs.com/package/slate-vue) which is Slate, but with a Vue plugin instead of React.

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#25

Post by ncphillips »

louisstow wrote: post #12
seanstrom wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at ProseMirror, let us know if this seems like what you want! https://prosemirror.net/

Would second ProseMirror. It was powerful enough for me to build essentially a code editor: https://qworp.com/

Would third prosemirror. Used it extensively for years

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#26

Post by thatswrong0 »

williamstein wrote: post #23
jitl wrote: post #19

The recent changes to the API in 0.50 look good. The number of iteration passes really shows. Out of the available open source editor frameworks, Slate is probably most similar to Notion’s internal editor system. If I had to rebuild on a framework tomorrow, it’d be Slate or ProseMirror. Still if I used Slate it would be with the expectation that I’d end up owning an aging fork of a forgotten version at some point.

I've been using Slate heavily this year. I'm not a Slate developer, but I've read a lot of the source code, follow all the Github issues, etc., and I'm "owning an aging fork". As far as I can tell, the API instability mentioned elsehwere in this thread resulted from a nearly complete rewrite (inspired by immerjs) that launched in May 2020; for over a year since then, the API has been very stable, mainly because Ian T…

How does virtualization play with text search? Did you end up having to roll your own?

I'm still working on migrating my team's Slate implementation from 0.47 to 0.5x.. the new API is simultaneously simpler but also.. harder for me to grok? Maybe I just am having trouble with the documentation because I end up reading the source more often than not.

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#27

Post by [deleted] »

throwyuno wrote: post #20
cris-ward wrote: post #10

Word of warning, their readme says 'Some of its APIs are not "finalized" and will have breaking changes over time as we discover better solutions.' I started using this library several years ago and have eventually had to rework it using prosemirror because I just couldn't keep up with the breaking changes. Both libraries work in very similar ways, with slate using React for its rendering layer. However Prosemirror h…

Same, I switched after a long stretch in 2020 where Slate bug fix PRs stagnated. I find the ProseMirror API less intuitive but overall it has fewer bugs and I have been able to customize it pretty heavily.

[deleted]

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#28

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

williamstein wrote: post #23
jitl wrote: post #19

The recent changes to the API in 0.50 look good. The number of iteration passes really shows. Out of the available open source editor frameworks, Slate is probably most similar to Notion’s internal editor system. If I had to rebuild on a framework tomorrow, it’d be Slate or ProseMirror. Still if I used Slate it would be with the expectation that I’d end up owning an aging fork of a forgotten version at some point.

I've been using Slate heavily this year. I'm not a Slate developer, but I've read a lot of the source code, follow all the Github issues, etc., and I'm "owning an aging fork". As far as I can tell, the API instability mentioned elsehwere in this thread resulted from a nearly complete rewrite (inspired by immerjs) that launched in May 2020; for over a year since then, the API has been very stable, mainly because Ian T…

The Slate rewrite looks much better than the previous version. It was a big step for them to remove Immutable, which had to happen given the state of that project (which, incidentally, got new maintainers last week). I'm not surprised it's rolling steady now. It's good that Ian delegated smoothly. I wondered how he did that rewrite while simultaneously working at Segment as a cofounder…

I agree that Slate is nicer than ProseMirror with a more standard code style, the fact that it's not scattered among a bunch of repos, and that it's written in TypeScript. And it's not great that ProseMirror seems to have a bus factor = 1, maybe 2 or 3. That's not the case with Slate right currently, right?

It's remarkable you built cocalc with Slate. And the virtualization. Really big work.

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#29

Post by brendanmc6 »

I've been building out a very feature-rich editor for the last few months using Slate. Looked at all the alternatives and fell in love with Slate's model over all others. It's been great so far, far better than the old Quill editor I've been tasked with replacing. My only complaints are related to documentation, and a few footguns if you misuse the provided utilities, or get too crazy with your rendered react elements.

Test-driven development is not my usual approach to coding, but it's extremely beneficial (and easy to do) with slate. Especially for the recursive normalizer, which has grown very complex and fragile but plays an extremely important role in my editor.

I worry about long term maintenance of the library, only a small trickle of contributions come in. But in practice its been a perfectly stable library.

RTE in the browser is a full-time job even with a library like slate. Be warned!

Re: Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

#30

Post by masa331 »

Does anyone knows about something similar but for building graphical HTML editors? I need to create an editor for non technical people where they will be able to drag and drop certain elements and set some of their properties. And the result of this building has to be html and css.
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