Building a Notion-Inspired Text Editor: Mastering React and TipTap

by | Mar 3, 2024

Overview

Vikram Thyagarajan’s article guides readers through building a Notion-like text editor using React and TipTap, emphasizing creating a seamless, unbounded writing experience. The article focuses on the TipTap framework, built atop the ProseMirror API, offering extensibility and customization for a rich text editing experience.

Key Components

  1. Framework and Extensions: Utilizing TipTap, built on ProseMirror, the guide explains how to leverage its plugin system and a set of out-of-the-box plugins to enhance the text editor’s functionality.
  2. Schemas and Basic Plugins: The article dives into defining HTML document schemas, including various HTML tags for block nodes (like headings, lists, quotes) and inline nodes (like bold, italic, underline). It also discusses extensions for additional features like history and gap cursors.
  3. Bubble Menu: A critical UI component, the Bubble Menu, is implemented using the BubbleMenuReact component from the @tiptap/react library. It appears when users select text, offering options like bold, italic, and link insertion.
  4. Commands Menu: The Commands Menu allows users to insert different node types (like headings, quotes, lists) seamlessly into the document. It’s achieved using a combination of TipTap’s CustomNodeViews and the Suggestion extension, providing a keyboard-navigable interface.
  5. Change Menu: The final piece, the Change Menu, assists in transforming existing nodes into different types (e.g., converting a paragraph into a quote). This menu requires deeper integration with the ProseMirror API and is more complex in its implementation.

Conclusion

The guide thoroughly covers the process of building a feature-rich text editor akin to Notion. It focuses on user experience, offering intuitive menus and seamless interactions for editing and formatting text. The article’s in-depth explanations and code snippets provide a solid foundation for developers looking to create advanced text editors in web applications.

You can read the full Article here -> https://vikramthyagarajan.medium.com/how-to-build-a-notion-like-text-editor-in-react-https://vikramthyagarajan.medium.com/how-to-build-a-notion-like-text-editor-in-react-and-tiptap-7f394c36ed9dand-tiptap-7f394c36ed9d