Differences between Prosemirror and Lexical

[tslocke]

I don’t have any insight about Lexical to add to the conversation, but just to mention I haven’t seen anything about document schemas with Lexical.

A lot of people use ProseMirror as “just” a very good rich text editor, but in reality it’s much more than that. ProseMirror is a full-blown schema-based structured or semantic editor, that feels like a familiar text editor. This is a remarkable, and unique (well, as far as I know) accomplishment. Structured editors have tended to be research toys or niche products because they didn’t solve this problem and instead are “a bit odd”. Maybe it’s a bad thing that there’s not more willingness in the world for people to give funky different kinds of editors a chance, but ProseMirror avoids that problem.

For the curious, here’s a thread form 2015 where Marijn goes into detail on how simple things like enter and backspace need very careful thought, and references a bunch of academic research.

Backspace and Enter (and Delete, I guess)

So the initial ad-hoc behavior I programmed turned out to be woefully inadequate (to my defense, it wasn’t much worse than that in many widely used WYSIWYG tools). But I wanted to define these in a way that actually followed some principle more rigorous than ‘I guess this is sort of what other tools do’. So I searched for literature on the subject. This was actually really hard to find—either I didn’t find the right jargon, or academics are so embarrassed by WYSIWYG-style editing interfaces tha…

See also: the blinking horizontal caret from the gap-cursor plugin : D

I’m sure loads of projects that use ProseMirror don’t need this power, but for those that do (mine does) I would guess Lexical is not an option, but I could be wrong.