Ask HN: What WYSIWYG editor are you using to make HTML form/textarea input easy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541081

by aditya • 17 years ago

26 29 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There's FCKEditor, TinyMCE, MarkitUp! and WysiHat. Which one are you using and why? And are there any new ones that I should be looking at?

lincolnq• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure most hackers use a text editor and a web browser. When dealing with CSS and JQuery, a wysiwyg editor will really get in your way (it's hard to visualize ids, classes, and onClick) and it doesn't make things very much easier, I think.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

I think the question is about what people are using for user input of html content in a web app. Not what hackers are using to write html.

noblethrasher• 17 years ago

Pretty sure he or she is talking about input forms for end users. That said, I like FCKEditor but I haven't really used any others. Last time I played with it, it was pretty easy to customize even if I had to resort to manipulating it object model with javascript.

jonknee• 17 years ago

The OP is talking about Javascript based WYSIWYG editors for HTML textareas, not an IDE.

erlanger2• 17 years ago

FCKEditor's pulling away from TinyMCE quickly. Version 3 looks very nice.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Seconded. It also handles Word cleanup a bit better.

couple others I've had my eye on...

WYMeditor: http://files.wymeditor.org/wymeditor/trunk/src/examples/01-b...

and jWYSIWYG: http://code.google.com/p/jwysiwyg/

niels_olson• 17 years ago

thirded. The FCKEditor for Mediawiki has become a mainstay of my personal notes wiki. When your free, beta, hack works better than anything else, that's probably a good sign.

izak30• 17 years ago

I've worked with both jWYSIWYG and WYMeditor and landed on TinyMCE. Doing cross-browser WYSIWYG is hard, and starting over always sounds like a good idea, but FCKEditor and TinyMCE both have years over these.

Dalziel• 17 years ago

Can anyone point out what's different in CKEditor 3 vs FCK2? I'm not seeing obvious differences

erlanger2• 17 years ago

Here you go: http://docs.fckeditor.net/FCKeditor_3.x/Design_and_Architect...

callmeed• 17 years ago

Thirded. I used it in my Rails help app and it was great. Easy install and none of the occassional broken layouts that I've had in the past with others.

aliem• 17 years ago

I'm a fan of MarkitUp + Textile, nothing more, it seems users likes it once they get used to the simple textile syntax. I'm against wysiwyg javascript editors, they tend to add a lot of overhead over the web page. The only wysiwyg editor i could recommend is WYMeditor (.... even if it isn't really visual editor).

sidsavara• 17 years ago

I use TinyMCE, but that's mainly because it came built into Wordpress and I think was easy for me to set up in Joomla at one point.

Worked well enough for me, never felt the need to change

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Related question: how I can securely filter user inputed CSS for a custom page / widget view?

cschneid• 17 years ago

parse & whitelist. Shouldn't be too bad, assuming you just throw out anything that even starts to look like bad input (make a super strict parser, and don't worry about css "hacks" like a real browser's parser would).

dylanz2• 17 years ago

Vim

dylanz2• 17 years ago

Oh, misread the question. TinyMCE. But seriously? Vim.

noamsml• 17 years ago

Mmm. Javascript vim clones...

gvb• 17 years ago

I'm with you on that. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070726

unalone• 17 years ago

A heavily-hacked version of TinyMCE at the moment.

brlewis• 17 years ago

I started with TinyMCE years ago and never had a compelling reason to switch.

justlearning• 17 years ago

I found the Express edition of MS Visual Web Developer very useful. I tried Aptana(eclipse based- memory hog), TopStyle(neat tool, with instant changes seen). But it came to the MS Web Developer, which i felt was more intuitive than others...me not being a web designer. but i never tried all the ones you mentioned...never felt safe enough to try web design on an online editor.

jimwalker• 17 years ago

I've looked at a few. Mainly FCKEditor and TinyMCE. I ended up using TinyMCE in the end for my projects. The amount of plugins they have tend to help at times.

auston• 17 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/jwysiwyg/

davesailer2• 17 years ago

"Xinha Here! is a wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor that enables WYSIWYG editing in any HTML textarea and text input elements."

As a Firefox plugin. Or use it the standard way.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1449

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

The YUI rich text editor is pretty damn good, especially when it comes to cross browser compliancy.

bobfunk• 17 years ago

YUI editor seconded - but we have extended it a bit to use my XHTMLPurifier (http://github.com/biilmann/javascript-xhtml-purifier) to clean up the HTML.

It's based on a partial implementation of the algorithm for parsing HTML specified in the HTML 5 draft - so it handles even really scary HTML from Word pasting, and spits of clean pretty printed and validating xhtml.

For our use we do put some pretty strict level on what markup people can include, though, so it might not serve for everybody.

buro9• 17 years ago

Just to add a mild hijack... can anyone recommend a bbcode wysiwyg editor? MarkItUp isn't wysiwyg, but the very last thing I want is to allow people to post raw HTML (DOM manipulation).

davesailer2• 17 years ago

Followup to Xinha/Xinha Here! (I forgot these...)

* 2007 Evaluation of WYSIWYG editors: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2007/wysiwyg-editor-tes...

* List of WYSIWYG rich text web editors from Genii Software Ltd: http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors

Ask HN: What WYSIWYG editor are you using to make HTML form/textarea input easy

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