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Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

I use Tip Tap in SvelteKit and I like it a lot. I'm really glad I chose it over Lexical and other options. Congrats on the recent YC funding! Nice to see a player in this space that isn't from Facebook/React dominant.

The only issue I have encountered with it that I haven't solved yet (I think there are multiple potential paths) is validating/sanitizing data with it.

To parse the content and turn it into raw text requires instantiating TipTap and all the attendant plugins. So even if I want to do a server side check for something like minimum character count, I have to 'decode' the JSON etc...

I know it's not the focus, but something that makes that easier would be nice. And something I could easily add to a Schema checker like Joi or Zod.

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> I'm really glad I chose it over Lexical and other options. Congrats

Do you mind expanding on this? I've been comparing the two and found the lexical data model easier to understand.

Have you tried using Lexical? I found it to be very buggy and ended up replacing it with Quill.

Would you mind elaborating on Lexical? Which parts did you find buggy?

I'm going to be honest, I did this evaluation several months ago and I don't remember all of the exact points. If I remember:

* I did not like that it was an alternative to a different Facebook rich text editor (draft.js)

* Very React focused (makes sense, it's a Facebook/Meta project) - even applying concepts. Here's an excerpt from their site: "If you've used React Hooks before, you can think of $ functions as being something that follows a similar pattern. These are functions that show their intent as to where they can or cannot be used."

I don't want to use React Hooks or things designed to be like React Hooks.

* Newer and less features/polished. Looking at their official project site, there's way less features already available. That means more custom code you have to write.

* No standard schema/for formatting rich content

It doesn't include Lexical, but GitLab did a detailed comparison of rich text editors a while back and settled on Tiptap. Their write-ups are pretty detailed:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/231725

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273238

Thanks for the links to the discussion, I wasn't aware of it. Seems like a nice long read and find out what others think about us. I will read it.

The first link shows a discussion that started in July 2020, when Tiptap was only available in version 1. The new major version 2, which is a complete rewrite, was in development. The biggest drawback the GitLab engineers had was the lack of a test suite in Tiptap 1. That's understandable, because as a key component of your application, testing is necessary to ensure that you catch breakable changes. Tiptap 2 does just that. [1]

[1] https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap/tree/develop/tests

I also liked it a lot, though I used it in React and had a bit of trouble with getting it to play nicely with useEffect.

I see that as an issue with React though, not TipTap. It’s a great editor and I love that it’s headless.

Curious what issues you ran into?

My memory is hazy since it's been a while, but I implemented collaborative editing in TipTap using YJS. This requires coordinating editor state with a socket interface and I had to use a bunch of useEffect trickery to make sure the state didn't get out of sync. I'm afraid I can't elaborate further, but I will say that I'd highly recommend TipTap if you want to build collaborative editing. Once I got it working, it worked perfectly.

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