https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/action_text_overview.html
Rails is a web framework. Why does it have anything to do with a WYSIWYG editor on the frontend? There's a giant vast offering of WYSIWYG editors to choose from that POST data back to your web backend just like any other form. I don't want rails to have any opinion or "state" of WYSIWYG selection for my application.
I kinda feel like Rails had it's heyday around 3.2 or 4.0 and since then has been creating problems to solve instead of solving actual popular use cases.
Man did you pick the wrong framework.
>There's a giant vast offering of WYSIWYG editors to choose from
As someone who has tried them all, I can definitively say this is not true. Trix/ActionText is the only one that works.
>Why does it have anything to do with a WYSIWYG editor on the frontend?
Because Rails is a full stack web framework. It includes its own front-end for tons of stuff. It's opinionated and wants people to do things The Rails Way.
That's an obviously false statement. There's like a dozen react based ones alone and at least as many vanilla JS ones all over the web. I've implemented several in Rails before with image upload support. Works no differently than any other web backend.
> Because Rails is a full stack web framework. It includes its own front-end for tons of stuff. It's opinionated and wants people to do things The Rails Way.
No, Rails explicitly does not have opinions on everything. It doesn't even come with built in authentication handling, which is a pretty major web framework component. I like that it has strong opinions about things like handling the HTTP request/response, configuration, code layout, ORM, etc but leaves a lot to the user to implement. In the past they've even culled features off into their own gem when they decided it wasn't relevant enough. A WYSIWYG text editor doesn't seem all that much like core functionality to me.
rails new app_name --skip-action-cable --skip-action-text etc...
Most of these libraries can be skipped, just type: rails new -h see all the options
Edit: in case you decide later on that you need them you can install them as you described with `gem actiontext` etc...