README
Trix
A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing
Compose beautifully formatted text in your web application. Trix is a WYSIWYG editor for writing messages, comments, articles, and lists—the simple documents most web apps are made of. It features a sophisticated document model, support for embedded attachments, and outputs terse and consistent HTML.
Trix is an open-source project from 37signals, the creators of Ruby on Rails. Millions of people trust their text to us, and we built Trix to give them the best possible editing experience. See Trix in action in Basecamp.
Different By Design
When Trix was designed in 2014, most WYSIWYG editors were wrappers around HTML’s contenteditable and execCommand APIs, designed by Microsoft to support live editing of web pages in Internet Explorer 5.5, and eventually reverse-engineered and copied by other browsers.
Because these APIs were not fully specified or documented, and because WYSIWYG HTML editors are enormous in scope, each browser’s implementation has its own set of bugs and quirks, and JavaScript developers are left to resolve the inconsistencies.
Trix sidestepped these inconsistencies by treating contenteditable as an I/O device: when input makes its way to the editor, Trix converts that input into an editing operation on its internal document model, then re-renders that document back into the editor. This gives Trix complete control over what happens after every keystroke, and avoids the need to use execCommand at all.
This is the approach that all modern, production ready, WYSIWYG editors now take.
Built on Web standards
Trix supports all evergreen, self-updating desktop and mobile browsers.
Trix is built with established web standards, notably Custom Elements, Element Internals, Mutation Observer, and Promises.
Getting Started
Trix comes bundled in ESM and UMD formats and works with any asset packaging system.
The easiest way to start with Trix is including it from an npm CDN in the <head> of your page:
[required]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/required
[setCustomValidity]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLObjectElement/setCustomValidity
[DocumentFragment]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DocumentFragment