Building a Simple Rich Text Editor with Lexical and React
The term “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) is commonly used in software to describe rich text editors or systems that allow editing text in a rich format. WYSIWYG editors provide immediate feedback, making it easier to work on documents.
In this article, we will use Lexical and React to build a simplified version of the Dropbox Paper editor. Lexical is a dependency-free, extensible text editor framework developed by Facebook.
What is Lexical?
Lexical is a fast, reliable, lightweight, and accessible editor engine designed to provide a great developer experience. It’s not opinionated about the appearance or styling of the editor’s UI, making it highly extensible.
Features of Lexical
- Plain text
- Rich text
- Selection
- History
- Clipboard
- List
- Table
- Code
- Link
Getting Started with Lexical
To get started, we’ll create a React project and install the necessary dependencies. We’ll then import the necessary components to create an instance of the editor.
Styling the Components
We can customize the appearance of nodes by defining a theme object, which maps CSS class names to the editor. Alternatively, we can define inline styles using Tailwind CSS classes in our theme object.
Building the Toolbar Component
We’ll create a floating toolbar similar to that in Dropbox Paper. The toolbar will have buttons for formatting text, such as bold and italics.
Alternatives to Lexical
There are several alternative tools to Lexical, including Draft.js and Editor.js. While they offer similar features, they have different underlying architectures and design principles.
By following this article, you should be able to build a simple WYSIWYG editor using Lexical and React. The Lexical framework provides a wide range of prebuilt plugins, making it easy to add different functionalities to your editor.
With its extensible design and cross-platform support, Lexical is an excellent choice for building rich text editors.