Sensible defaults?

1

Firstly, I really hope this doesn’t come across as a whine, as I am a big fan of the project and I understand its alpha software and rapidly evolving. However, I’ve been away from ProseMirror for a six months or so and things look a lot different! I’ve had to ditch all my react-prosemirror based code and start again…

However, after half a day of bashing my head against it I still haven’t got a functional editor. Following the guides I end up with a downgraded textarea, i.e. an editor that can’t delete or add new lines, and can’t apply any formatting. Trying to replicate the Markdown example on the demos involved navigating 3 repos and 3-4 files, copying maybe 1000 lines of semi-boilerplate code and getting to grips with about 10 different pages in the reference. Then I had a wall of console errors. (I don’t remember it being this difficult earlier in the year?) In the end I gave up and tried another text editor which was up and running in about 5 minutes.

I guess this (finally!) leads to my question - what is the idea longer term for ProseMirror in terms of “sensible defaults” i.e. most text editors have broadly the same features, is the plan really that I’ll have to write or copy 500-1000 lines of code for “standard” text editor features (whatever that means of course)? I see this approach has already been taken with the baseKeymap, although to be fair I couldn’t get any plugins to load.

Again, I only bothered to post because I really respect the project and the overall approach being taken, I just for the life of me couldn’t get it running with the resources/time I had available.

2

Yes, this has been a side-effect of moving towards a more abstract, non-opinionated core. At this point, the prosemirror modules are more of a set of building blocks than a functioning editor. That is unavoidable, if we want to not make assumptions about the schema and the way it will be used. I think this is a good thing, on the whole, but it does mean that casually slapping a ProseMirror instance into a site isn’t something you can do (though I think your estimate of needing 1000 lines is much exaggerated).

What someone could do is write a batteries-included, less general editor component on top of ProseMirror. That would be straightforward to do, and would probably be very helpful to many people. Unfortunately, I am only a single person, and maintaining the core (along with a bunch of other projects) is already all the burden I can bear, so I hope someone else picks up that concept and executes it well.

3

Thanks for the response marijn, I understand the reasoning and I can imagine you have quite a lot of projects to juggle!

4

@marijn do you know of any batteries-included editors based on ProseMirror?

5

Nope, I am not aware of any yet.