[lewisjoe]

Thanks for the pointer. His comparison of Draft vs Lexical makes a lot of sense. I'm keener to understand the different between Prosemirror vs Lexical. He mentions that he pulled the best ideas from libs like Prosemirror.

I'm curious how Lexical is an improvement over Prosemirror's approach. As to my current knowledge,

1. Prosemirror considers state as the source of truth and syncs to subsequent states using deltas. The state keeps in sync with view allowing us to directly modify states to bring effect in the view. I hope this is the core of Lexical as well. One thing that isn't to my satisfaction is syncing ad-hoc view changes to reverse update the state. Is it better in Lexical? basically can plugins like Grammarly not screw-up Lexical's internal state?

2. ProseMirror does take a modular approach. It has zero dependencies and allows us to pull in only the necessary parts needed for our feature-set. How similar or different is Lexical in this aspect?

3. Prosemirror has a rich plugin system. Everything is a plugin - even the keyboard shortcuts. Very similar to Lexical I hope?

4. ProseMirror has a concept of Decorators i.e if you want to decorate your views without reflecting those decorations on the model. For example, if we want to underline spelling errors, but not include spelling error boundaries in the rich text's core data model. How is this dealt with in Lexical?

Essentially, I'm curious as to what areas Prosemirror could have taken a better approach!

[trueadm]

I don't think ProseMirror has taken a bad approach. I think we've just taken a different approach when it comes to the design of things. In Lexical, you rarely concern yourself with the DOM – and typically you deal with Lexical's node API directly and that's really all you touch.

Lexical also treat its own EditorState as the source of truth. We use DOM MutationObservers to ensure the DOM matches the EditorState at all times. We do allow external mutations from things like spellcheckers update Lexical – otherwise people wouldn't be able to use Grammarly and other tools with Lexical. However, that's really constrained so that they don't overreach.

Lexical also has the notion of double-buffering. When you update Lexical, or use a node transform, you're actually mutating the "work in progress" EditorState. Once Lexical feels that the EditorState is ready, it will commit it to the DOM, and that EditorState will become immutable and will reflect what you see on the page.

[lewisjoe]

quick question: I assume it ships(or supports a plugin) with a serializer to convert an editor state JSON to HTML. Does it depend on browser APIs to do so? Can it be somehow liberated out of native DOM APIs and language bindings for JSON-2-HTML in common languages like Java & Rust.

This could be a huge win for simple multi-platform rendering.

[trueadm]

The EditorState is fully JSON serializable. You can use JSON.stringify in the browser, or an alternative on other platforms. You can then pass the stringified values around and parse them using `editor.parseEditorState()`

[lewisjoe]

But, let's say I'd like to parse this stored state and send an email (as HTML) on the server?

My best guess is to use a NodeJS/V8 instance on the server to somehow transform JSON to HTML using Lexical's serializer (if something like that exists). Even this is tricky because it might depend on browser DOM apis for the conversion.

A better solution would be support language specific bindings to get HTML from JSON with zero dependecies.

Any chance you thought along these lines?

[trueadm]

Yeah, I'd roll with Node/Deno and use Lexical that way. :)

[zhamdi]

There's no documentation on how you do that. I'm struggling with this exact point now

[CanRau]

Deno