The bane and choice of Rich Text Editors
Date : 2008 10 13 Category : Tech & Development
Ajaxian
Whenever Abe Fettig is in town I think about how painful his live has been working with rich text editors :)
Stuart Atkinson has kindly done a roundup of the state of rich text editors, and it covers:
TinyMCE: There’s a modified version of this included in Wordpress these days, and it’s extremely well supported by its developers. You get all the formatting options you’d expect, plus the ability to easily remove excess formatting tools with just a little code. As an added bonus, there’s a collection of plugins which enable even more advanced formatting options. YUI Editor: Sadly, this one is quite often ignored, perhaps due to that fact it’s the product of a large corporation. Nonetheless, I know a kick-ass set of tools and utilities when I see one, and this editor is fit for any such best-of list!You have 2 main configurations for this - Editor and simpleEditor. You’re not limited to these however, as once you get to grips with the API you can bespoke it with relative ease. FCKEditor: FCKEditor is one of the longest standing web-based editors out there, and used in a great many open-source apps. It’s also available in a number of server-side languages FreeRichTextEditor: FreeRichTextEditor is gaining more momentum these days, and comes available with 2 modes available straight out the box: design, code and preview. WidgEditor: This is the work of client-side coding guru Cameron Adams, whose personal project has become an extremely viable, standards-based rich text editor for web applications. The JavaScript behind is also lean yet easy to read (should you want or need to understand it further), and the code output is smooth.
Then, people in the comments linked to WYMEditor, OpenWYSIWYG, NicEdit, and Dojo's editor (Abe Fettig in part).
Are there others out there that you like? Any experiences that you would like to share? A friend recently jumped from a paid widget to TinyMCE saying that it was finally ready for prime time.