What is your favorite FOSS WYSIWYG editor?

Please consider editing the original question's headline to specify "HTML" too :-).

Otherwise a reader might think (as I did) that you're asking a question the answer to which could be LibreOffice Writer or other things like that.

There isn't one.

This space has a lot of churn; a hot new project is started by a dev who claims they'll finally have "the solution" for the WYSIWYG space. Then it gets dropped after a few years. In fact many of the comments are listing archived projects no longer under development.

This is an unfortunate drawback to truly free software. The only two WYSIWYG editors I can recommend are OSS but have premium plans and premium plugins. However even their free plans are more capable than most other options. Corporate backing has upsides.

I would try TinyMCE. The docs are okay and it is a true WYSIWYG. If you're ready for the learning curve, and want to make something with virtually unlimited capabilities, CKeditor cannot be beat. The CKeditor model is a subtle abstraction you don't notice is there, unless you need it in which case it's very powerful. The documentation is incredible. The pre-built editors and plugins cover many use cases.

> I will buil[d] the project using ruby on rails

Not an editor, but you might want to look at:

"Modern Front-End Magic With Rails 7: A Visual Editor For Markdown (Part 1)" and part 2 (no part 3?):

https://kuy.io/blog/posts/modern-front-end-magic-with-rails-...

https://kuy.io/blog/posts/modern-front-end-magic-with-rails-...

Or just use their rail engine for blogging:

https://kuy.io/blog/posts/today-we-released-bloak-the-rails-...

https://github.com/kuyio/bloak

ProseMirror.

It's by far the best codebase I've seen so far with regard to web editors.

https://prosemirror.net

Another comment mentioned TipTap2. If you're using React and like abstractions, TipTap2 is a good choice in my opinion.

But I also enjoyed working with ProseMirror without another library on top.

PS: AtlasKit has a lot of boilerplate code for working with PM that makes things easier: https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/packages/editor/editor-core

> atleast I need to be as useful as wordpress article editor

The WordPress article editor (Gutenberg) is FOSS, so you could just use that in your project. That's definitely at least as useful as the WordPress article editor! ;)

https://lexical.dev/ is nice.

There are efforts to document how you can use WordPress editor as a stand alone library for your web projects. https://github.com/WordPress/Gutenberg/platform-docs/docs/in...

I like https://www.slatejs.org/examples/richtext and found the source code very readable and adaptable to my needs.

Use Gutenberg or a block editor like this (https://github.com/codex-team/editor.js) for a CMS. The HTML based WYSIWYG days are over.

I really enjoyed working with Prosemirror/TipTap2. It‘s extremely flexible!

This doesn't exactly answer the question, but as someone who's done web stuff for years and who is an extreme fan of the GPL, nevertheless I end up using stuff like Divi and Elementor under Wordpress.

This, to me, is where the "paying for software that isn't free in either sense" has finally reached a fair equilibrium? Which is to say, thanks to the free-ness of the underlying platform -- it seems absolutely equitable to be like, "dig in and use the free but more difficult stuff that's out there, or just drop some money on this pay stuff (which you're also still generally free to hack with.)

I don't think very much software under "you can't have it unless you pay for it" is very good, but this is an exception.

almost everything i used has bugs and edge cases.

these days i just try to stick with markdown, which is more controlled and scope-limited, albeit more targetted for technical people.

I've had a lot of fun working with both:

1. Lexical

2. ProseMirror/Tiptap

Both of these are very extensible, actively developed, and well-built. Tiptap is indy and pushes its pro product now (fair). Lexical is supported by meta. Pros and cons to both of these FOSS types.

Spent some time researching on this a while back

I think best bet is Lexical. It is actively maintained and simple yet extensible with a lot of things

Installing Summernote (https://summernote.org) was easy. ProseMirror and Lexical seem much more complicated.

I love TipTap, easy to use and setup even with Rails. I wrote an internal gem (that I should publish) where I can generate TipTap document JSON/HTML from the Rails side of things as well.

I've been using TipTap2/Prosemirror extensively in a side project, and I'm really happy with it so far.

https://webstudio.is/

Gutenberg.

ckeditor works for me most of the time