README

A completely customizable framework 
  for building rich text editors.




  Why? ·
  Principles ·
  Demo ·
  Examples ·
  Documentation ·
  Contributing!




  



  
    
  
  
    
  
  
    
  



Slate lets you build rich, intuitive editors like those in Medium, Dropbox Paper or Google Docs—which are becoming table stakes for applications on the web—without your codebase getting mired in complexity.

It can do this because all of its logic is implemented with a series of plugins, so you aren't ever constrained by what _is_ or _isn't_ in "core". You can think of it like a pluggable implementation of contenteditable built on top of React. It was inspired by libraries like Draft.js, Prosemirror and Quill.

 🤖 Slate is currently in beta. Its core API is useable right now, but you might need to pull request improvements for advanced use cases, or fixes for some bugs. Some of its APIs are not "finalized" and will have breaking changes over time as we discover better solutions. There isn't currently a 1.0 release schedule, we're still getting the architecture right.

 🤖 Slate is also contributor-driven. It is not backed by any huge company, which means that all contributions are voluntary and done by the people who need them. If you need something improved, added, or fixed, please contribute it yourself or no one will. And if you want to become a more active maintainer, let us know in the Slack channel.



 Why?

Why create Slate? Well... _(Beware: this section has a few of my opinions!)_

Before creating Slate, I tried a lot of the other rich text libraries out there—Draft.js, Prosemirror, Quill, etc. What I found was that while getting simple examples to work was easy enough, once you started trying to build something like Medium, Dropbox Paper or Google Docs, you ran into deeper issues...

- The editor's "schema" was hardcoded and hard to customize. Things like bold and italic were supported out of the box, but what about comments, or embeds, or even more domain-specific needs?

- Transforming the documents programmatically was very convoluted. Writing as a user may have worked, but making programmatic changes, which is critical for building advanced behaviors, was needlessly complex.

- Serializing to HTML, Markdown, etc. seemed like an afterthought. Simple things like transforming a document to HTML or Markdown involved writing lots of boilerplate code, for what seemed like very common use cases.

- Re-inventing the view layer seemed inefficient and limiting. Most editors rolled their own views, instead of using existing technologies like React, so you have to learn a whole new system with new "gotchas".

- Collaborative editing wasn't designed for in advance. Often the editor's internal representation of data made it impossible to use to for a realtime, collaborative editing use case without basically rewriting the editor.

- The repositories were monolithic, not small and reusable. The code bases for many of the editors often didn't expose t