Redactor - javascript (jQuery) WYSIWYG editor

http://redactorjs.com/

by tortilla • 14 years ago

318 89 14 years ago

redactorjs.com

bdfh422• 14 years ago

On the face of it a very nice editor - good work.

some confusion on licenses - MIT is available but with a caveat and I don't think you can do that.

amper5and• 14 years ago

There's no caveat. It says "Redactor распространяется бесплатно по лицензии MIT или GPL, на ваш выбор." which literally means "Redactor is distributed freely under the MIT or GPL licenses - it's your choice."

Edit: This goes to the lack of English docs, not to your misunderstanding I'm sure.

drewmclellan• 14 years ago

In the source of the script itself, it has:

    Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses.

...which is how jQuery is licensed, as is common for plugins and other jQuery-based projects.

bdfh422• 14 years ago

Interesting - the text with regard to the licensing changed between my first and subsequent visit - now clearly licensed as you say.

wvl• 14 years ago

Looking at this again 3 days later, it seems the license has been changed again. The license is now the "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.", and they're charging for commercial use.

flippyhead• 14 years ago

curious as to why this is different/better than so many other editors?

pyrotechnick• 14 years ago

Where does it say it is different/better than so many other editors?

dumphuk• 14 years ago

Agreed, didn't seem that special .. now this on the other hand: http://www.aloha-editor.org/

bergie2• 14 years ago

Yep, Aloha is very cool, especially now that they're replacing ExtJS with jQuery UI to make it lighter. It is unfortunate that they've stuck with the problematic AGPL, though.

That was the primary reason that made me start http://hallojs.org

jscheel• 14 years ago

I'm a big fan of Aloha. I can't wait for them to get extjs out of the system. That, combined with the fact that they include their own copy of jquery (just in case you don't have it loaded) makes the payload beyond crazy for a wysiwyg editor. If you use it, I highly suggest compiling your own minified version that does not include jquery. That will at least get the size down some, at least until the move to jquery ui is complete. Just keep in mind the license whenever you do anything with it. I'm still not convinced anyone understands how AGPL applies to publicly available js.

MechanisM4• 14 years ago

Take a look at http://jejacks0n.github.com/mercury/

president2• 14 years ago

the table support is pretty great

dcesiel2• 14 years ago

Is there english documentation? I only see the zip download. Is this code on github?

JiPi• 14 years ago

Is code available on Github?

This seems really promising at first. Would love to try it soon but it really needs a public repo. English documentation would be a great plus too! :)

phleet• 14 years ago

Bolding (and other similar operations) should use Cmd instead of Ctrl on OS X. Google docs does this

Johnyma22• 14 years ago

Also see http://beta.etherpad.org for a nice editor

popee• 14 years ago

Etherpad uses java, so if you don't like that try etherpad-lite based on node.js. Like ~10x less memory at startup :-)

https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite

MechanisM4• 14 years ago

It's good but codebase is so huge..

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

It uses inline styles. That's an issue for me. It also looks like it doesn't do nested lists.

On the other hand, full-screen mode is really cool.

CCs• 14 years ago

Nested list works: create a list, select a couple lines, indent.

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

You're right. I guess I was trying to use the list icons.

MechanisM4• 14 years ago

This is another one russian text editor - http://elrte.org/demo. Comes with filemanager - http://elfinder.org/

theuglyfggt• 14 years ago

Boring. IBM can do much more, fggggt. lol http://maqetta.org/

opendomain• 14 years ago

IBM did create an excellent open source wysiwyg html5 editor http://maqetta.org/ - check it out to compare

n-gauge• 14 years ago

Looks Good!, unfortunately slow as hell...

buremba2• 14 years ago

it seems lightweight even if the minified version is 40kb.

wavephorm• 14 years ago

I think we're starting to approach a time period where lamenting over filesizes over 10KB should be a thing of the past.

I have a fairly typical internet connection, and I can download 40 MEGABYTES in about 8 seconds.

buremba2• 14 years ago

you're right but if you working with a module loader (like require.js or yepnope.js) it affects actually.

joshfraser• 14 years ago

I disagree. The size of the typical webpage is growing at faster rate than people are upgrading to faster internet connections. The average webpage is now > 1MB. It matters because adding even a tenth of a second to your load time can cost you in pageviews and revenue.

petitmiam• 14 years ago

Fairly typical internet connection in what country? In a major city?

tzury• 14 years ago

Selecting a word, making it "bold", looking at the code, seeing word.. .

Shouldn't it be ?

kijin3• 14 years ago

There's a reason why W3C didn't just replace and with and . A lot of people think they're just equivalent, but a lot of other people disagree. "Please display this in italic" arguably sends a different message from "Please emphasize this", and in some settings they may not be interchangeable.

celoyd3• 14 years ago

The classic example is screen readers. A phrase that’s italicized because it’s important should probably be slightly louder, but a phrase that’s italicized because it’s foreign should probably be pronounced slightly slower. Those are entirely orthogonal things, and it’s useful to distinguish them.

Semantic HTML + CSS can be taken too far, but having separate layers gives you a lot more flexibility than presentational HTML alone, which tends to be very brittle.

stesch• 14 years ago

The b element is back in HTML5.

callum85• 14 years ago

Just to expand on kijin's reply...

In HTML5, and now have the deliberately vague semantic definitions of "alternate voice" and "stylistically offset" – this could cover emphasis, book/film names, key words, foreign phrases, etc. Incorrect use of the more specific semantic tags (eg. generating when the user sets a film title to "italic") is worse than a lack of semantic detail.

HTML5 was designed with the understanding that not all web content can be authored by someone who knows the correct use of semantic HTML tags like <cite>, , , , etc. Application-level copy can use those tags, but a rich text editor (for normal people) can't know which one is appropriate, so it should always default to the vague ones, and .

justincormack• 14 years ago

Why default to those? You dont justify that, you only justify the existence of a default.

websirnik• 14 years ago

Have been using it for a while now. The latest version is pretty stable. Ability to resize images inside the editor is pretty cool.

tzaman2• 14 years ago

Thank you, but I'm sticking with https://github.com/xing/wysihtml5

veb• 14 years ago

Why?

tzaman2• 14 years ago

1. Because all the documentation is in english

2. Because it doesn't use inline styles

3. Because it produces valid html5 markup

4. Because it's proven end tested in Basecamp Next

5. Because it's made by Xing

jejacks0n• 14 years ago

I'd suggest https://github.com/jejacks0n/mercury if you're using Rails.

Full disclosure, I'm the primary author.

MechanisM4• 14 years ago

Twitter Bootstrap enabled editor http://jhollingworth.github.com/bootstrap-wysihtml5/

nabilt• 14 years ago

I just added bootstrap-wysihtml5 to a project and I'm liking it. My only problem is it won't let me type comments in the HTML view and I can't figure out how to dynamically resize the text area. Redactor seems to let you do this. Looking forward to trying this out as well.

Edit: Redactor looks like it retains formatting for the HTML. That's enough to make me switch.

chmike3• 14 years ago

It deserve it's fantastic qualifier. It's the first wysiwyg editor I test that works correctly with iPad. Excellent work.

I would love to make it simpler to insert iPad images. Basically make the upload intermediate step not visible. Unfortunately it is not possible to upload images from the iPad.

edit: unfortunately copy past doesn't work on iPad. The selection is difficult and the copy is simply ignored. Past inserts whatever is in the clipboard.

d0mine2• 14 years ago

Copy-paste works for me on iPad

chmike3• 14 years ago

It is the copy operation from inside the editor text area that doesn't work.

If you copy text in another place, it gets stored in the clipboard and the past operation works as expected. If you copy text selected in the editor text area, the clipboard is left unchanged. Pasting gives you whatever was in the clipboard.

So trying to copy text from the editor text area and pasting it in another app or place doesn't work since it's the copy operation that doesn't work.

The text selection is also not working as expected since it behaves slightly differently than other iPad text editable text field. But this is not a real problem.

chj• 14 years ago

honestly i didn't expect it to work at all on iPad. truely amazing.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

I had two issues: you have to click on the top of an empty textarea to start editing (guessing the first input position), and text entry stopped working after pressing the bold button.

kijin3• 14 years ago

Firefox 12. Font color selector doesn't work in full-screen mode. (The color palette doesn't appear when you click on the font color icon.)

jabo• 14 years ago

I don't like the fact that when I resize the editor the content disappears until I complete the resize. During the resize (click on the tab at the bottom and drag), the content disappears.

antiterra• 14 years ago

Looks nice, but I was unable to stretch the image back to its original size after shrinking it. It kind of inches a little bit and then stops. It's irritating to see the page announce itself as "fantastic" when it's clearly not properly finished.

kalininalex• 14 years ago

Interesting. It's seem to be the issue with capturing mouse events. If you move the mouse out of the image quickly, it'll lose it and the resize will stop. But if you move the mouse slowly so that it always stays over the image, it'll resize it. It's a workaround to use for now (but sure, it's a problem with the implementation).

josscrowcroft• 14 years ago

Great work, really nice to use. Would love to see this as a WordPress plugin (sick of the default editor) but that would require plugin support, as per the roadmap.

alanh2• 14 years ago

These are terrifically hard to make, and I applaud anyone who take the time and effort.

But, a problem: Tapping Bold with no text highlighted (the expectation is that whatever you type next is bold) not only doesn’t work, but steals focus and you lose your cursor

You should not consider this library production-ready!

godDLL3• 14 years ago

> You should not consider this library production-ready!

Surely you kid, this is the nicest one I am to see come out yet. File a bug mate.

alanh2• 14 years ago

How extensively have you tested it? Obviously you don’t give a rat’s ass for UX

skyhook_mockups• 14 years ago

This is ok... although there are lots of better alternatives. Some issues:

- No way of adding headings? * edit: sorry it's under styles.

- Clicking bold, italic etc should expand the selection to the word that the cursor is in.

- Setting formatting should restore the cursor to the editing area

- Clicking into a formatted area should toggle the buttons in the toolbar that apply

- image alignment a little clunky. Why not add a simple overlay for align centre|left|right on mouseover?

On the plus side image resizing is done well.

One thing that annoys me no end is that all editors I've ever used apply block level formatting (h1,2,3 etc) for an entire paragraph when only a sentence is selected. The most intuitive approach would be to break the sentence out of the paragraph and style only it. As a user I expect what I have highlighted to change not all of the surrounding text as well!

These things aren't easy to get right, especially cross browser. I recently put together an editor to exactly suit my needs (uses contenteditable instead of an iframe), but it's chrome, firefox and ie9+(? i think) only. Trying to get something usable across legacy browsers is ridiculously hard.

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

MIT license is the best part - and great that it's fully featured!!!

rquantz• 14 years ago

Can anyone recommend an editor with a really good API for making custom buttons? My admittedly shallow research hasn't uncovered anything that is particularly joyful to use.

godDLL3• 14 years ago

This one isn't bad on that front, you should take a look.

alecperkins2• 14 years ago

The fullscreen mode is a nice touch, as is the image resizing, provided the cursor doesn't leave the image boundary. It's frustrating that, like other editors, it doesn't differentiate so well between line and block actions. Also, I was very disappointed that I couldn't drag the image to reposition it.

tvon• 14 years ago

FWIW, both MCE and CK have fullscreen mode.

NathanKP• 14 years ago

One fairly important thing I couldn't figure out how to do was move the image around. I guess I expected it to work like Wordpress or Blogger's post editor where you can drag the image around to adjust its location in the text. Instead I could only resize the image using click and drag, not move it.

alecperkins2• 14 years ago

I'd love to see a drag-and-drop editor that doesn't require the image be absolutely positioned and can have text interact with the image. Somewhat like iBooks Author, but without fixed page sizes.

dools• 14 years ago

That's what we do in Decal[1]. It's very hard to get right - we're reasonably close but it's still a little finicky. Basically while you drag the image around it follows your mouse but when you drop it, it tries to guess the best place to insert it into the HTML so that it will most closely approximate your desired position. You can see it in action without signing up in our instructional video on placing images: http://www.decalcms.com/page/Support/#instructionalVideos

[1]http://www.decalcms.com/page/4_minute_challenge

grayrest• 14 years ago

I haven't used iBooks Author, but you may want to check out Squarespace 6 when we launch in the next few days. I'm very proud of our editing and layout system.

http://new.squarespace.com/ <- about halfway through demo video.

godDLL3• 14 years ago

You double-click it.

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

The image options needs a little bit of work, maybe a button in in the corner to edit the float position (left/right), a little transforming box to change the size when is selected (those little squares in the corners like Photoshop) and the ability to drag it from any other part.

philipes• 14 years ago

I was looking for something like this earlier today.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

I played with such javascript things a few years ago.

They were indeed hard to create and (at least then) relied on a detailed know of the browser and platform's characteristics.

But given the varying tasks which call for that kind of editor, what I'd really like to see is a small semi-standard tool or framework for the construction of such editors. As it is now, one must either use an existing tool having too many or too few features or go to the great lengths of modifying one.

president2• 14 years ago

First major competitor to TinyMCE i've seen. Great work, this is awesome!! I hope this becomes big.

dybskiy• 14 years ago

I think this code is much easier accessed when hosted on GitHub so I'll maintain the repo for now: https://github.com/dybskiy/redactor-js

wamatt• 14 years ago

Would be great if it supported clipboard pasting of images like Gmail does.

fidz• 14 years ago

I wonder why people make so much different rich text editor. while i only use Markdown format for my projects. I wonder about the Rich Text to HTML compatibility (some rich text editor have problem with interpreting formatted text into the HTML, since then i afraid to use rich text editor and more using it).

jakejake• 14 years ago

Markdown is great for projects where the users don't mind writing using code. WYSISYG editors are nice for people who are not technical at all to manage their website and things like that.

They do sometimes produce really terrible HTML though, especially because people copy/paste from MS Word and it results in a bunch of garbage.

chmike3• 14 years ago

Markdown has a lot of shortcoming because it maps to basic html. i.e. It ignores starting numbers and numbering gaps.

Markdown is not a standardize encoding. Many markdown editors don't support tables for instance.

Finally, as an editor, it lacks the easiness to add images and such. They need to be uploaded in a web server.

It thus has significant limitations before it can be considered a serious rich text alternative.

I do use it and I would love it had a better support because it is easy. What I like is that when writing we focus on the text, not the formating. Formatting is implicit.

matthewking• 14 years ago

Looks very nice, I'm glad there's some movement in this space lately.

Ran into a bug though, if you insert a table then return twice after it, all content below the table is removed..

aichi• 14 years ago

It is maybe nice, but not good, because it is not generating same output in all browsers. Also copying from word (most needed) is not filtered properly and same in all browsers.

Redactor - javascript (jQuery) WYSIWYG editor

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