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by josephg 28 days ago
Yeah I did a review of web based rich text editors a couple years ago. They all seemed fine on desktop, but on mobile every one I tried was junk. I couldn’t select. Autocorrect was broken. Tapping text didn’t move the cursor. Typing would stop working. The keyboard wouldn’t disappear when the element lost focus. And so on.

There have been several efforts over the last couple decades to add a proper rich text element to the web. I don’t know why they have all failed - I guess it’s a large, complex and thankless task. It’s a pity. Proper native rich text support is one of the web’s big blind spots. It’s a problem native platforms have solved decades ago.
2 comments
syedfakhtar 28 days ago
Meta has a text editor framework called Lexical that works well on mobile, I've used it at work before with great success. Perhaps you missed this one?

https://lexical.dev/

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alfirous 28 days ago
This one if I recall also used by Payload CMS.
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oneshtein 28 days ago
Fix your phone.
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lioeters 28 days ago
That's the ideal solution, because (it seems to me that) the issues that break rich text editors are caused by non-interoperable ad-hoc hacks from mobile browsers and operating systems. These rich text editors can work perfectly fine on desktop browsers, yet have countless buggy behavior on mobile. The editor side is not the main problem, it's the mobile side that needs to be fixed and better implemented in a consistent manner across platforms.
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josephg 28 days ago
I disagree. Rich text editors on the web are already a massive hack, because there aren’t any built in input elements which support rich text. There’s just contentEditable and textarea (plain text). There’s no such thing as “doing it properly” when it comes to rich text. Editors have to hack around what the browser provides via a million event handlers. And - surprise! Mobile browsers don’t expose the same events as desktop browsers.

The right fix is for browsers to have a real rich text element of some sort. Then editors wouldn’t need all their hacks. And mobile browsers would be able to behave correctly when you tap on some editable rich text.

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