stylo VS slate

I recently integrated Stylo: https://stylojs.com/ It was simple and the editor looks simple, I like it.

Stylo

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/

This one is super hot off the press (literally just announced on Twitter today) and still in alpha, but you might want to check out: https://stylojs.com/ - its lightweight/minimal and uses web components.

- it creates a layout based on rows and cells, so it support multi-column layout - each cell can contain a different "cell-plugin", - richt-text editor based on https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate is built in and comes with its own plugin system. It can do weight, italic, block-types, alignment and lists and can be extended as you want (even with elements storing data and interactive components) - you can create custom cell plugins based on a schema (or custom control ui) and a component that should be rendered - it stores an object tree that represent it, not html. It therefore can contain any react component, which is great if you want to allow your editors to add interactive components or components that you already built as part of the app - i carefully optimized for SSR and bundle size, so no editor ui is rendered nor loaded. editor ui is only loaded on the client if you disable readOnly. (lazy loading) - it mainly tested with nextjs, since i used it for content-heavy pages. - its not yet tested with react-server components, but it should actually work in read-only mode

Finally there's Slate and Lexical which are super powerful in terms of customizability and extensibility. They're great options for when the editing experience plays a major role in the product.

Slate, as per its documentation, is a completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. Therefore, it doesn't offer a feature-rich text editor but instead provides tools to build one. Let's create a component called Slate and see what the Slate editor looks like.

Link to Repo

Word of warning about Slate: I love the API and the design goals, but it appears to suffer from some fundamental issues. We were experiencing issues similar to this one and a team of multiple 10+ year experienced frontend devs couildn't figure out what was going on. I had to completely rip out a feature we had built with Slate and had to reimplement a new version from scratch with Lexical. So far we have no issues other than those inherent to rich text editing.

We're trying to choose between Lexical and Slate at work. Do you have any examples that would be similar to this? https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/blob/main/site/examp...

If you are going to customise a ton of functionalities and/or implement new functionality I suggest using SlateJS. If not, have a look at Sun editor.

You definitely need to give Slate (https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate) a try - the best editor framework I've used.

Slate: Looks very promising, but it's for React. (Someone has floated the idea of making it framework-agnostic, but the maintainers haven't committed to that goal yet.)