Quill v2 – Rich text editor

ulrischa | 453 points

At my last job I had built a system where users could enter text into a quill textbox (and style it), and then save it into a database in their delta format. Later, a different team member would pull that into an InDesign plugin where we could easily read what styles had been applied to the text in quill, and style that using the styling in InDesign. This was used when the front desk person would enter in a legal notice for a newspaper, and the production team would be the ones who would get that into InDesign for printing. The quill delta format that it uses made this process so much easier than if we were to have been given HTML like most other editors output / save. Glad to see this is still around, its been a few years since I had heard / used quill.

majormunky | 13 days ago

Release notes: https://github.com/quilljs/quill/releases/tag/v2.0.0 Announcement post: https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/

I've used quill quite a bit. It's easy to integrate, the json delta format works decently well, and is pretty straightforward, but one thing I find myself doing whenever I use it is asking myself, "Should I just be using prosemirror?".

I find Quill to be a great stopgap solution for when I need editing and I need it quick, but in the back of my mind I'm always mentally adding that I'll need a migration plan should that specific feature ever grow in requirements.

jjcm | 13 days ago

Am I crazy for having an obnoxiously strong opinion about how return should be handled by text editors?

Plain text return = new line.

Rich text return = new paragraph (shift + return = new line if you want).

This was a big problem for me with earlier versions, unsure how customizable this behaviour is now.

I do appreciate that I probably care too much about this, but I found TipTap worked well.

crowcroft | 13 days ago

Kudos on the docs: I encourage all open source projects to have a "Why Quill"[1] type page so I can quickly understand the philosophy of the project and how it aligns with my goals.

Even better when they also have "Why Not Quill" type content so you can quickly learn situations where it may not be the best fit. Every project makes tradeoffs and communicating those directly and clearly helps ensure users have a better experience.

[1] https://quilljs.com/docs/why-quill

toddmorey | 13 days ago

This is not obvious from the link but I guess this is posted because of v2 released 3 days ago.

I have been working with Quill v1 not long ago and oh boy it is not good. Pain to make tables work with plugins and weird scrolling issues. Hopefully v2 fixes a lot but I'm sticking with TinyMCE as it is superior in term of features.

blain | 14 days ago

At first I couldn't figure out why Quill was being posted again, but now I see that a long awaited version 2.0 was released 3 days ago (see https://slab.com/blog/announcing-quill-2-0/ ). Thank you for the heads-up!

davidkellis | 14 days ago

An old project I worked on was badly bitten by using Quill. IMO the issue is that they didn't vet the limitations of the editor well enough compared to the project's requirements but the way the documents went on about the extensibility of the library did feel like it was going to cause harm.

It's a great library provided you stick with its limitations (ie nothing too complicated with nested content). A "Why You Should NOT Use Quill?" type section on the website would probably go a long way

forgotacc240419 | 13 days ago

Ymmv, but I will never use Quill for a production project again.

We started using Quill 1.x around 2016, I initially liked it a lot. Jason proactively reached out to me when I first tweeted about considering Quill, and he was helpful when I had questions about the implementation.

Fast forward to 2019, we were running into some bugs, Quill 1.x was in maintenance mode, and 2.0 was effectively undocumented [1]. I reached out to Jason on Twitter [2] to get a sense for the timeline, and he basically told me to get lost. (Also his company Slab now blocks me on Twitter, though I imagine he just meant to block me from his personal account.)

Everyone has stressful days, especially when building a startup, so maybe that was just a bad time for me to reach out. My best guess is that they were focused on their own company (fair!) and barely had the time to maintain Quill for their own internal usage, let alone release it as open source. If that's the case, I wish they'd been upfront about it.

5 years later, Quill v2 is finally live. I'm glad to see Slab is still around, and I hope they have the bandwidth to publicly maintain Quill going forward. But if you're thinking about using this in production, I would push on what their commitment is to supporting it, and have a plan for if they stop responding.

(Jason, if you're on this thread, no hard feelings, water under the bridge. Feel free to ignore or chime in with your own perspective.)

[1] https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/2435

[2] https://twitter.com/nickbaum/status/1177240103925796865

nickbaum | 13 days ago

Related. Others?

Announcing Quill 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12437345 - Sept 2016 (82 comments)

Quill – A cross browser rich text editor with an API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10446865 - Oct 2015 (47 comments)

Quill – An Open Source Rich Text Editor with an API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716376 - May 2014 (60 comments)

dang | 13 days ago

I remember using https://github.com/facebook/lexical for a project a year ago and mostly things worked our of the box.

Any reason to prefer quill?

Recursing | 13 days ago

I have this project[1] that you can run from a GitHub code space, drop a some markdown files in, and push to GitHub pages. Basically trying to be as low code or no code as possible for a blog replacement.

Feedback from non-technical users is markdown is still annoying. Could quill be used in to edit as a wisywig with the output being markdown? That way the user could start the dev server and edit from there without having to touch the vscode file explorer.

[1] https://github.com/easy-astro-blog-creator/easy-astro-blog-c...

J_Shelby_J | 13 days ago

Just a small bug report:

On the custom fonts demo, select one of the paragraphs and change its font. Then select that paragraph and another paragraph (which has the original font).

The font selection dropdown shows one of the paragraphs' fonts, and selecting it (to set both paragraphs to have that font) is not possible.

robertlagrant | 13 days ago

Slightly off topic question:

I want to publish blog on a domain I own -- I currently use Netlify+Hugo and NetlifyCMS but the editor experience (Richtext / Markdown + upload individual images) is very poor. There is no concept of saving drafts either; or ability to edit the hierarchy/URLs of posts after they are published.

I wish this tech got out of my way and simply let me focus on the content -- text, formatting, pasting images -- and one click save/publish.

Is there a simpler WYSIWYG editor that allows us to simply type, format and publish blog posts?

Life is too short to deal with high-maintenance / high-friction / brittle setups.

albert_e | 12 days ago

Quill or Slate is the question im asking myself these days.

christkv | 13 days ago

Man, I really should revisit whether or not TinyMCE is still the best open source option

skeptrune | 14 days ago
[deleted]
| 13 days ago

The style would be beautiful if you could remove the borders

https://quilljs.com/playground/snow

Alifatisk | 12 days ago

Which one is easiest to implement hashtags (predefined list, associated colors) and @ mentions, which insert an <a> tag we can programmatically define. I can compromise on formatting features.

aitchnyu | 13 days ago

Is there a way to do nested bullet lists on mobile?

thih9 | 13 days ago

Looks promising but I do not see advanced customization examples like a widget or dialogs to insert custom html elements

ulrischa | 14 days ago

Is anyone aware of a word processor, text editor, whatever, that can handle HTML definition lists natively?

pmlnr | 13 days ago

No download link, no mention of RTF. What "rich text editor" is that ?

hulitu | 13 days ago

I just merged a bigger pr last week where I used quillv1. My feature was fairly straight forward - I added a DSL so that users could build custom filter expressions for our trace-data analysis (automotive). I wanted to be tight with my business logic so I added my own lexer, parser and grammar evaluation with neat compiler hints and such - was a joy.

But when it came to the frontend it was infuriating. All I wanted was to hightlight the idex of my "compiler-error" but it was just a mess (every once in a while the text-cursor would jump around, sth I simply couldnt fix entirely). Ontop of that this [issue](https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/3806) exists - which forces us to upgrade once primeNg lets us. Anyone knows a good alternative? I am done with quill and would love to use something more stable.

Blackarea | 11 days ago

Funny, I'm using quill.js + tribute for a project last week

ramon156 | 14 days ago

Is there support for CSS classes in Quill v2?

bkyan | 13 days ago

Is Gutenberg a good alternative these days?

ulrischa | 13 days ago

Can anyone compare to Lexical?

lukasb | 13 days ago

I'd honestly wondered if Quill had been abandoned!

Great to see a release!

firecall | 13 days ago

[dead]

jacksonhacker | 13 days ago

[dead]

barfard | 13 days ago

[flagged]

ikesau | 13 days ago

What does “trusted by” actually means? A friend of mine works at Microsoft and they have never heard of this project.

• Is it that they know one person at Microsoft, any random employee among +221k, who uses the editor?

• Or is it that one of the developers works at Microsoft? (which, unless they are Satya Nadella, shouldn’t matter)

• Or is it that their (not so anonymous) telemetry tells them that someone is using the editor from a Microsoft-owned IP address?

• Or are the company logos simply there to mislead potential new users into thinking those companies actually trust the developer(s)?

guessmyname | 13 days ago

For a second there I thought this was https://quill.art/

robotburrito | 13 days ago