Unlock the Power of Quill: Building a Feature-Rich Text Editor in React
When it comes to writing comments, composing blog posts, or crafting advanced articles, a well-configured and performant text editor is essential for productive work and a great user experience. Among web developers, Quill stands out as a popular choice, offering a rich text editing experience based on the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) principle.
What Makes Quill So Popular?
Quill’s ease of use, customization options, awesome documentation, and open-source nature have made it a favorite among developers. As shown in the npm trends popularity graph below, Quill has consistently outperformed other WYSIWYG text editor alternatives over the past year.
Building a WYSIWYG Text Editor in React
In this tutorial, we’ll create a fully functional text editor with text formatting options and full access to the editor’s content using Quill and React.
Setting Up the Workspace
First, let’s set up a React application using Create React App, which requires no setup and creates a fully working React boilerplate within a minute. Open your terminal and run the following command:
npx create-react-app quill-editor
Initializing the Text Editor
Install the react-quill package, which is a React wrapper around Quill, by running the following command:
npm install react-quill
Then, open the App.js file, import the ReactQuill component, and include it in the App component.
Choosing Themes and Toolbar Options
Quill comes with two built-in themes: “Snow” and “Bubble”. The “Snow” theme includes toolbar options such as h1, h2, h3, bold, italic, and underline, while the “Bubble” theme offers a tooltip-based interface reminiscent of Medium’s standard text editor.
Configuring the Toolbar
Quill allows users to control which toolbar features to use. The supported options can be divided into inline, block, or embed elements. You can customize buttons by providing the type for the object key, and group features by nesting arrays.
Accessing Editor State
To make practical use of the content, we need to access it. We’ll use React’s built-in useState hook to create a value variable that will hold the content of the editor. Then, set the setValue function as the onChange event handler in the ReactQuill component.
The Final Result
After combining all the features, we have a rich text editor that looks like this:
With Quill, you have full access to the editor’s content, which can be processed and stored afterward. Congratulations, you’ve created a fully working and feature-rich Quill text editor in React!