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Ask HN: Ever implemented these editors: Quill, DraftJS, ProseMirror, TipTap?

12 points by seantconrad ↗ HN
I'm working for a client and looking to present them the pros and cons of a few WYSIWYG editors and really want to talk to someone who has used one of those. I'd love to learn why you chose one over the other options. Thanks!

6 comments

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samwillis
I have used ProseMirror and TipTap. Arguably ProseMirror is significantly more advanced and mature than Quill and DraftJS. TipTap is a layer over ProseMirror with a slightly easer developer UX - ProseMirror can be quite a steep learning curve.

My suggestion would be, if the rich text editor is front and centre a major part of your app, or you are building Google Docs, ProseMirror is the way to go (or TipTap but be prepared to drop down to the ProseMirror api).

If the editor you are building is offering secondary functionality or is on the simpler end of the spectrum, say a text input for a chat app, use TipTap.

One of the nice things with TipTap is they have put significant effort into providing wrappers for all the major front end frameworks.

If you want real-time collaborative editing, TipTap and ProseMirror have first call support for Yjs, which is phenomenal.

jhoogland
Great article on the subject (not mine): https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/engineering/tiptap-part-1 TLDR: switched from slate to tiptap

I’m very happy with tiptap. It’s headless, pretty easily extensible (built on top of prose mirror), and has many sensible defaults (for links, mentions, images, etc.) The docs sometimes leave something to be desired but the discord is great.

billconan
I have used prosemirror and tiptap

Because I need to implement “real-time markdown” tiptap has an example for that. Also because I use VUE

majormunky
I think the delta format that Quill uses to store its data is pretty interesting, we use it to convert text written in a Quill editor to InDesign where we preserve the formatting (the delta format helped here quite a bit).
jimmygrapes
I never got around to implementing Quill (or any of its alternatives) but I do remember reading through the spec documentation some years ago with a vague sense of tingly pleasure. Sad to hear the final product wasn't so great, but I hope the effort and concepts put into that delta spec gets its due somewhere.
charrondev
I’m the development lead for Vanilla Forums and I implemented our WYSIWYG editor in Quill 4 years ago.

Things changed a lot since then and I can’t recommend it:

- project mainteners started a SaaS service based on quill. A lot of editor code now is proprietary. - a public release hasn’t been made in years. - the maintainers don’t accept contributions or manage the issue tracker.

Just use something else.