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majormunky
joeriddles
Sounds like an interesting system :)
jjcm
Release notes: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/releases/tag/v2.0.0 Announcement post: https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/
I've used quill quite a bit. It's easy to integrate, the json delta format works decently well, and is pretty straightforward, but one thing I find myself doing whenever I use it is asking myself, "Should I just be using prosemirror?".
I find Quill to be a great stopgap solution for when I need editing and I need it quick, but in the back of my mind I'm always mentally adding that I'll need a migration plan should that specific feature ever grow in requirements.
ksec
I wish we could change the submission to [1], since it really is about the new version. On the hand I sometimes wonder why we can have standardise rich text editor.
eropple
I've been looking at ProseMirror (mostly through tiptap2, which seems to wrangle it effectively) but taking the jump is daunting. I'd be interested in others' experiences.
notresidenter
Tiptap is a great wrapper around ProseMirror, and if you need to dig deep, TipTap lets you do that but the documentation, for both TipTap and PM isn't as good as it could be and the conceptual model for PM is _hard_ to pick up on the go. I've spent several days on it to get close to what we spec-ed, granted, that's probably a tenth of what I would've spent if I had to build it from scratch, but definitely an investment, because getting all the little interactive details and the way that the custom inline/block elements should work just as the user expects is _hard_.
Overall, it's the only tool I found that makes it as easy as possible to create a good writing/editing experience but it's a hard easy.
wgj
I've used prosemirror enough to have written custom nodes, commands, and custom code around its collaboration model. I got good results with all of this and I don't know any other platform that could have matched it.
The docs are thoughtful. There's an up-front learning curve to understand the architecture. When doing highly customized things, I referred to the source when needed.
For standard rich text, there are a lot of options. Prosemirror shines when you want to build on it as a platform.
pier25
I spent weeks back in 2020 fighting with PM trying to customize behaviors such as bullet points etc. At the time the documentation was sparse and for me progress was extremely hard.
I ended up abandoning the project but wrote a short introduction here which might help you get started.
pembrook
Tried Tiptap recently and it was fairly buggy even for basic stuff like lists. Apparently the team behind it went the VC route and raised a few million so ideally they'd be moving faster at this point, but it doesn't seem much improved from when I tried it a few years ago.
That said, text editing in the browser is indeed a nightmare, so it's hard to fault anyone trying to make it easier.
amelius
I didn't know there was that much money in writing a rich text editor ...
tbeseda
With the release of Quill v2, I went away from TipTap + PM to Quill. My use case is not super complex. I just want a decent editing experience (for trusted, technical people, not average end users) and solid HTML I can save to a db.
Quill has `getSemanticHTML()` which is great for my implementation.
PM is great, but expansive and overpowered for my needs.
jasonjmcghee
TipTap has the equivalent with `getHTML` which is calling a PM function that does the same.
runarberg
I needed to implement rich text editing at my job. So I looked at many options, quill was among the first one I looked at, but I ended going with ProseMirror. The reason I picked ProseMirror was how low level it was, and the extensive documentation that goes with it (kind of reminds me of D3 really). Since picking it I’ve written a few custom nodes, custom commands, a custom tool bar, integrated with markown + custom markdown plugins, and it all integrates rather neatly with Vue (though with some glue code).
So far I’m very pleased with my choice of ProseMirror.
crowcroft
Am I crazy for having an obnoxiously strong opinion about how return should be handled by text editors?
Plain text return = new line.
Rich text return = new paragraph (shift + return = new line if you want).
This was a big problem for me with earlier versions, unsure how customizable this behaviour is now.
I do appreciate that I probably care too much about this, but I found TipTap worked well.
hombre_fatal
It should be easy to configure, but I don't think that behavior should be the default since it's less general and only works when you press Return from certain types of blocks.
Shift + Return also isn't available on mobile. And it's annoying having a hidden key combo just to get behavior you want. I seem to regularly battle with Reddit's rich editor that does this.
All to save me from having to press Return twice.
Though I can appreciate the niceness of how clean it is to always keep the user inside a <p style="margin-bottom: 2em"> while making them opt (with Shift + Return) into a <br>, I'd yield to UX over cleanliness when it comes to something as finicky as rich text editors.
oneeyedpigeon
Totally agree - even that "shift+" support makes me nervous, but I'd probably concede it! The "<p><br></p> in the Quill example looks... awkward.
jdthedisciple
No, you are 100% correct.
rodface
If I am reading this correctly then it resembles the behavior of the Confluence/JIRA text input windows.
dbalatero
That seems correct to me!
nathancahill
TipTap is fantastic.
toddmorey
Kudos on the docs: I encourage all open source projects to have a "Why Quill"[1] type page so I can quickly understand the philosophy of the project and how it aligns with my goals.
Even better when they also have "Why Not Quill" type content so you can quickly learn situations where it may not be the best fit. Every project makes tradeoffs and communicating those directly and clearly helps ensure users have a better experience.
QualmsAplenty
[dead]
blain
This is not obvious from the link but I guess this is posted because of v2 released 3 days ago.
I have been working with Quill v1 not long ago and oh boy it is not good. Pain to make tables work with plugins and weird scrolling issues. Hopefully v2 fixes a lot but I'm sticking with TinyMCE as it is superior in term of features.
jackconsidine
I like TinyMCE too and swapped out a Quill editor in its favor 6 months ago. But I was annoyed that you needed an API key to use their static JS in your site and disturbed that they rapidly shrunk free tier "use" of rendering an editor a few days back [0]. Out of curiosity, is that not an issue for you?
romanhn
You can self-host without an API key. Unfortunately they just switched to the GPL license, which may or may not work for you.
davidkellis
At first I couldn't figure out why Quill was being posted again, but now I see that a long awaited version 2.0 was released 3 days ago (see https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/ ). Thank you for the heads-up!
dwallin
Yeah, I think this link and title would be a better entry point into the topic.
forgotacc240419
An old project I worked on was badly bitten by using Quill. IMO the issue is that they didn't vet the limitations of the editor well enough compared to the project's requirements but the way the documents went on about the extensibility of the library did feel like it was going to cause harm.
It's a great library provided you stick with its limitations (ie nothing too complicated with nested content). A "Why You Should NOT Use Quill?" type section on the website would probably go a long way
nickbaum
Ymmv, but I will never use Quill for a production project again.
We started using Quill 1.x around 2016, I initially liked it a lot. Jason proactively reached out to me when I first tweeted about considering Quill, and he was helpful when I had questions about the implementation.
Fast forward to 2019, we were running into some bugs, Quill 1.x was in maintenance mode, and 2.0 was effectively undocumented [1]. I reached out to Jason on Twitter [2] to get a sense for the timeline, and he basically told me to get lost. (Also his company Slab now blocks me on Twitter, though I imagine he just meant to block me from his personal account.)
Everyone has stressful days, especially when building a startup, so maybe that was just a bad time for me to reach out. My best guess is that they were focused on their own company (fair!) and barely had the time to maintain Quill for their own internal usage, let alone release it as open source. If that's the case, I wish they'd been upfront about it.
5 years later, Quill v2 is finally live. I'm glad to see Slab is still around, and I hope they have the bandwidth to publicly maintain Quill going forward. But if you're thinking about using this in production, I would push on what their commitment is to supporting it, and have a plan for if they stop responding.
(Jason, if you're on this thread, no hard feelings, water under the bridge. Feel free to ignore or chime in with your own perspective.)
fovc
No experience with Jason, but I have to say I’ve spent waaay too much time reading the Quill code trying to figure out how to patch around weird behavior. Which is frustrating because that’s what a RTE library (vs roll your own) is supposed to be. Not sure about v2, but the v1 code is just not very well architected.
There are basic features we’ve held off on implementing for fear that it will lead to a million little bugs.
The Delta format is the best thing about Quill by far. But I’d advise anyone looking for more than bold/underline/italics to use prose mirror.
dang
Related. Others?
Announcing Quill 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12437345 - Sept 2016 (82 comments)
Quill – A cross browser rich text editor with an API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10446865 - Oct 2015 (47 comments)
Quill – An Open Source Rich Text Editor with an API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716376 - May 2014 (60 comments)
enraged_camel
This announcement is for version 2, which I think was released a few days ago.
Recursing
I remember using https://github.com/facebook/lexical for a project a year ago and mostly things worked our of the box.
Any reason to prefer quill?
J_Shelby_J
I have this project[1] that you can run from a GitHub code space, drop a some markdown files in, and push to GitHub pages. Basically trying to be as low code or no code as possible for a blog replacement.
Feedback from non-technical users is markdown is still annoying. Could quill be used in to edit as a wisywig with the output being markdown? That way the user could start the dev server and edit from there without having to touch the vscode file explorer.
[1] https://github.com/easy-astro-blog-creator/easy-astro-blog-c...
bloopernova
This looks perfect for a nascent guide I wanted to write, thank you for creating and sharing it!
robertlagrant
Just a small bug report:
On the custom fonts demo, select one of the paragraphs and change its font. Then select that paragraph and another paragraph (which has the original font).
The font selection dropdown shows one of the paragraphs' fonts, and selecting it (to set both paragraphs to have that font) is not possible.
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At my last job I had built a system where users could enter text into a quill textbox (and style it), and then save it into a database in their delta format. Later, a different team member would pull that into an InDesign plugin where we could easily read what styles had been applied to the text in quill, and style that using the styling in InDesign. This was used when the front desk person would enter in a legal notice for a newspaper, and the production team would be the ones who would get that into InDesign for printing. The quill delta format that it uses made this process so much easier than if we were to have been given HTML like most other editors output / save. Glad to see this is still around, its been a few years since I had heard / used quill.