Discussion summary
Wordgard is an in-browser rich-text editor based on ProseMirror, which is widely used in web applications. Discussions highlight its impressive design, API features, and concerns about its maintenance status.
What the discussion says
- ProseMirror is a backbone for many web editors, including ChatGPT.
- Some users dislike WYSIWYG editors due to frustration with formatting.
- There are concerns about the future maintenance of ProseMirror.
- ProseMirror's API and design are praised, but some worry about dependency risks.
- Users share experiences and questions about using Wordgard and ProseMirror.
“ProseMirror is the backbone of many web editors, including ChatGPT.”
“The thought that Prosemirror is no more in active development is scary.”
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- Hacker News
- One area every editor has failed for me is a very basic one: can I type a full sentence in the editor using my iPhone?
Wordgard failed that test. Inputs coming from autocorrect or the keyboard suggestions are swallowed and delete the partially typed/misspelled word.
by dstaley - The artwork on the website is beautiful! What a (forgotten) way to draw ones attention.by yule
- ~6 years ago had a very hard time researching and implementing an @-style remote resource completion (other users and documents to reference) and the style of extensions in this editor seem very much like an evolution of prosemirror.
I'd really appreciate it this was something built in, not something I have to build based on the dinosaurs example. Every time I need to reach for one of these text editor libraries that is my no. 1 usecase, followed by WYSIWYG.
by mhitza - One thing i've struggled with with Prosemirror (via TipTap) is that I very often need to interact with JSON representation of the document programmatically to extract data from it, this means I need (okay, strongly prefer) a statically-typed representation of it.
Prosemirror doesn't really have any mechanism to do this, so i've ended up doing one of these two things:
1. Define the schema twice, once using Prosemirror and once using something like Zod. Then having a battery of equivalence tests to assert that the schemas match. 2. Build a meta schema definition layer that can output a Prosemirror schema, but conforms to the standard schema spec (https://standardschema.dev/), this approach is more viable if not using something like Tiptap.
I haven't tried using Wordgard yet, so I can't tell if it does anything to address this, but just calling it out as a pain point i'd love to see solved.
by andrewingram - This looks staggeringly brilliant.
I was searching for something like this recently but ended up rolling my own using a block-based OT to local server and diff sync to remote ones.
I’m reading the system guide and nodding along. It’s super validating to see the similarities and contrasts.
by wood_spirit - Getting that WYSIWYG editor up and running was a major stumbling block that I overcame to get my school newspaper a PHP-Nuke site ~25 years ago.
It is insane that there isn't a web standard implementation for this passed 15 years ago.
by mapt - The editor aside, really impressed by the artist who did he design - really tasteful, def stood out for me https://kamilastankiewicz.com/
- I think most people would love to the know the 'why'. This page discusses differences with prosemirror and is the closest I got to that question: (https://wordgard.net/docs/prosemirror/).
One thing to note is that there is not an upgrade path. Many concepts are shared with prosemirror, but it seems that switching means doing quite some work (correct me if I am wrong). Obsidian is based on Code Mirror so I guess they won't be switching, but tiptap.dev and others do.
@marijn, maybe you could address why wordgard is worth the switching cost?
EDIT: I see many points are addressed in Marijn's personal blog. I submitted (https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/wordgard-0.1.html) to HN for better context.
by exceptione