jsx-readme VS rich-markdown-editor

Maintaining open source is a noble, but can be time-consuming endeavor. It doesn't have to be, though. During Hacktoberfest 2020 I used one of my repositories to experiment with automation around contribution and maintenance of jsx-readme. This is what I learned.

The best way to understand the result of the script above is to just look at the package itself - jsx-readme uses it to create its own README.

Great article and fantastic choice!

This is a topic I have been very interested lately. I had been lucky to start using since Slate 0.61.x, but I cannot say anything good about it. It has a major problem with managing large documents [0]. I tried to introduce multiple improvements of performance, but it is very ungrateful project – change in one place affects many things at the same time. I am shocked, how many projects are still using it. For example, open-sourced Notabase [1]. My 4+ weeks with Slate.js completely killed motivation, and I was only thinking to put a whole project to litter.

In the result of being unhappy, I switched to Draft.js. It was 2020, and I was eager to try it out, so I did. Sadly, in 2020 there was also the last release [2]. Initially, I didn't like how it works. I preferred the Slate data model. Also, the draft.js project felt not maintained at that time (by looking at commits activity, issues and pull-requests). It is written in the Flow which I detest. I spent few weeks to try "merge" the draft.js and sentry with doing a "rewrite" to TypeScript. Obviously, quickly I realized myself it is stupid idea.

Then, I took a look at ReMirror. Yet another problem that was struggling with maintenance and active contributors. It is based on ProseMirror, so I thought it is better choice than previous. ReMirror is overly complex for simple things. It was hard to find any help - neither by googling examples nor via ReMirror's Discord (it was dead silence there).

After that, I have found information about the TipTap. Back then, there was only provided support for Vue.js. Fortunately, it was that time, when they have promised the v2 with React support. I skipped it to wait for the new version.

Maybe, a raw ProseMirror with React? Yep, tried it, but I wasn't very happy of the result. I knew the TipTap v2 will be released and there were already existing projects that were using ProseMirror behind the scene, for example: Outline's rich-markdown-editor[3]. It has tons of built-in components that I had with Slate. I was extremely happy about it, because "everything what I needed" was there – typical bold, italic, code, code block, quote, multi-level list and even table editing. Really awesome piece of code! However, authors decided they are opting for TipTap and they have archived repository on GitHub, which means officially the project is dead.

I had no time to test Quill.js. It looked interesting, but it has noticeable poor development pace, and it looks a dead project with many bugs.

Currently, I am using the TipTap v2 and I can't say how happy I am now. I guess I will stick with it for longer. However, I know the journey to find the best Rich Text Editor has not ended. There are more alternatives, for example Stylo [4] that I've found in this week.

[0] Try to copy the contents of https://www.slatejs.org/examples/huge-document and paste it back. In a result, my Firefox on Macbook M1 hangs.

[1]: https://notabase.io/

[2]: https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/releases/tag/v0.11.7

[3]: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

[4]: https://stylojs.com/

Thanks! We forked this version of ProseMirror built by the Outline team which was the closest to what we wanted for our product

https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

Outline's rich-markdown-editor (https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor) package is pretty nice. I have used it to make some custom MD editor/CMS experiment.

Good eye! This is indeed based on ProseMirror. I didn't create it myself though, I'm using this: https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

Ah yes, I found the library I was using for the editor (rich-markdown-editor) to insert a lot of \ newlines when they weren't needed. I'll take a look at this sometime!

The outline editor is open source https://github.com/outline/rich-markdown-editor

It runs a mult-tenant SaaS app with very low memory/cpu requirements (https://getoutline.com/)