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by freehunter 2474 days ago
I don't have any numbers to back it up but I believe you're wildly underestimating the number of Rails projects that need WYSIWYG editing. The state of WYSIWYG editors in Rails is so unacceptably poor that I'm glad they're bundling it out of the box. It's kind of like Microsoft making their own laptops, because every other Windows laptop of the time was undeniably junk.
3 comments
reilly3000 2474 days ago
It looks like a decent WYSIWYG editor was one of the headline features of this 6.0 release. Its straight from Basecamp so you know its polished to the hilt.

https://trix-editor.org/

https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/action_text_overview.html

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dzader 2474 days ago
Yeah, I am extremely excited about this - small sample size but I've worked on a handful of rails apps and I seem to always need a WYSIWYG editor and could never find one I really liked - glad to see it better incorporated!
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debaserab2 2474 days ago
> the state of WYSIWYG editors in Rails is so unacceptably poor

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.

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freehunter 2474 days ago
>I don't want rails to have any opinion

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.

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debaserab2 2473 days ago
> As someone who has tried them all, I can definitively say this is not true. Trix/ActionText is the only one that works.

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.

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hit8run 2474 days ago
You don't need to use action text if you want to go with an own solution. Action Text is so well integrated that inserting (and uploading) images via drag and drop works out of the box.
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