react-simple-wysiwyg

Simple and lightweight React WYSIWYG editor. Demo.

Description

Key features:

• pretty small (~9kb, ~4kb gzipped)
• fast
• simple to configure
• simple to extend
• support automatic LTR and RTL text direction switching for Arabic languages

Of course, it's not so powerful as other complex editors. It DOES NOT:

• ✗ change HTML generated by a browser (sometimes it can be dirty)
• ✗ sanitize HTML (you can use sanitize-html)
• ✗ contain advanced features as others (like table editor, image editor and so on)
• ✗ support old browsers (IE 11 is minimal)

If you need a more powerful solution for React, you'd better take a look at more powerful editors like Slate.js, Tiptap, CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill or Summernote and so on.

Usage

1. Install with npm:

   npm install react-simple-wysiwyg

   or CDN (unpkg.com)

   <script src="//unpkg.com/react-simple-wysiwyg"></script>

2. Use the component

   import { useState } from 'react';
   import Editor from 'react-simple-wysiwyg';
       
   function App() {
     const [html, setHtml] = useState('my <b>HTML</b>');
         
     function onChange(e) {
       setHtml(e.target.value);
     }
       
     return (
       <Editor value={html} onChange={onChange} />
     );
   }

Component Props

Generally, all props as well as a ref are passed to the content editable element, which is a div element. It also supports a few additional properties to act like an input element:

• autoFocus
• disabled for read-only mode
• name for onChange event
• placeholder
• tagName 'div' ny default
• value

You can also set the root container props using containerProps property.

Custom toolbar

import { useState } from 'react';
import { 
  BtnBold,
  BtnItalic,
  Editor,
  EditorProvider,
  Toolbar
} from 'react-simple-wysiwyg';

export default function CustomEditor() {
  const [value, setValue] = useState('simple text');

  function onChange(e) {
    setValue(e.target.value);
  }

  return (
    <EditorProvider>
      <Editor value={value} onChange={onChange}>
        <Toolbar>
          <BtnBold />
          <BtnItalic />
        </Toolbar>
      </Editor>
    </EditorProvider>
  );
}

Check DefaultEditor.tsx for details.

Custom buttons

This library contains only a basic set of buttons, but it can be extended easily. Check buttons.ts and dropdowns.ts for example. Most of the buttons use document.execCommand. You can find a list of all available commands there. This API is deprecated, but there is still no alternative and there are no plans to remove it from browsers. Most of the popular WYSIWYG editors continue using it.

import { 
  BtnBold, 
  BtnItalic, 
  createButton, 
  Editor, 
  EditorProvider, 
  Toolbar
} from 'react-simple-wysiwyg';

const BtnAlignCenter = createButton('Align center', '≡', 'justifyCenter');

export default function CustomEditor({ value, onChange }) {
  return (
    <EditorProvider>
      <Editor value={value} onChange={onChange}>
        <Toolbar>
          <BtnBold />
          <BtnItalic />
          <BtnAlignCenter />
        </Toolbar>
      </Editor>
    </EditorProvider>
  );
}

Editor style and size

By default, it fills the whole width of the parent element, and the height depends on a content height. It could be customized easily. The root element of the editor has rsw-editor css class, so you could use it in your styles.

Also, you can pass containerProps to customize editor appearance. Here's an example how make the editor resizable:

<Editor 
  containerProps={{ style: { resize: 'vertical' } }}
  value={html}
  onChange={onChange}
/>

All css classes are consistent, so feel free to use these names in your css:

• rsw-editor (root container)
• rsw-ce (editable area)
• rsw-toolbar
  • rsw-btn
  • rsw-separator
  • rsw-dd (drop down list)

Troubleshooting

Style issues: no list item bullets, wrong link styles and so on

#31, #44, #45

RSW editor doesn't isolate its styles from the parent styles. It's a pretty common case when you use a global reset or normalize styles which remove bullets or numbers for lists. To fix that, you should redefine these styles again:

.rsw-ce ul {
  list-style: disc;
  padding-left: 2em;
}

.rsw-ce ol {
  list-style: decimal;
  padding-left: 2em;
}

Insert a link which target="_blank"

#55. Also, it's a good example of inserting a custom HTML element.

Credits

• Based on lovasoa/react-contenteditable
• Uses Material Design Icons