Once upon a time Substance.io was the only framework available for building editors. Now it seems we have entered a new age of editor frameworks… the leading contenders look to be:
- ProseMirror – see this post featuring some examples plus check out this editor assembled by Atlassian.
- CKEditor5 – once an embedded WYSIWYG style editor, it now offers an editor framework called CKEditor5. Some examples here.
- And of course Slate and Draftjs. These two have been around for a while but I’m still getting a handle on them… their examples are a little clunky and I don’t have a sense yet as to how they compare to the above.
It is a new age. Whats interesting to me is that there is an emergent new category of software – editors built on top of editor frameworks… we don’t see many examples at this moment because it is a relatively new field – ProseMirror was 1.0 only late last year, the latest CKEditor5 1.0 beta was also released only a few months ago, while Substance released a beta over a year ago (they are yet to release a stable 1.0).
But examples will come in time. I think we will see more community develop around some of these projects (ProseMirror seems to be the leading contender to me on this front), and some sophisticated apps built with these tools. The project that develops the following will start leading the field :
- a humming community around the libraries that provide feedback and can have input into the overall design
- a thriving community building apps using the libs and helping each other to do so
- exemplar applications (multiple) emerging out of (2)
We are watching and learning…Thanks to Jure for his research on this recently.
