Stylo

Another kind of rich text editor.

• Interactive design 🎯
• Customizable 💪
• Framework agnostic 😎
• Lightweight 🪶
• Future Proof 🚀
• Open Source ⭐️

A project from Papyrs, a blogging platform on web3.

Table of contents

• Getting Started
• Concept
• Installation
• Usage
• Config
• Plugins
• Toolbar
• Menus
• Events
• Listener
• Contributing
• i18n
• License

Getting Started

Stylo is an open source WYSIWYG interactive editor for JavaScript. Its goal is to bring great user experience and interactivity to the web, for everyone, with no dependencies.

Concept

The library - a web component - needs as bare minimum property a reference to an editable HTML element (contenteditable="true").

It needs only one single top container set as editable and will maintain a list of children, paragraphs, that are themselves HTML elements.

<article contenteditable="true">
  <div>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</div>
  <hr />
  <ul>
    <li>Hello</li>
    <li>World</li>
  </ul>
  <div>In ac tortor suscipit.</div>
</article>

To keep track of the changes for a custom "undo redo" stack and to forward the information to your application, the component mainly uses the MutationObserver API.

It also uses some keyboard, mouse or touch events to present UI elements or apply styling changes.

Installation

You can use Stylo via CDN or by installing it locally.

CDN

Add the following code to your page to load the editor.

<script type="module" src="https://unpkg.com/@papyrs/stylo@latest/dist/stylo/stylo.esm.js"></script>

That's it, the component is imported and loaded.

Local Installation

Install the editor in your project from npm:

npm install @papyrs/stylo

Afterwards you will need to load - i.e. import - the component in your application. Use one of the following methods, the one that fits the best your needs or framework.

Loader

Lazy load the components with the help of a loader. This is the recommended solution to load Stylo in vite projects.

import {defineCustomElements} from '@papyrs/stylo/dist/loader';
defineCustomElements();

Import

Import the library.

import '@papyrs/stylo';

Custom Elements

It is also possible to import only selected element, as for example the <stylo-color /> component.

import {StyloColor} from '@papyrs/stylo/dist/components/stylo-color';
customElements.define('stylo-color', StyloColor);

Note: it will recursively define all children components for a component when it is registered.

Usage

To integrate the editor to your application, add the following tag next to your editable element:

<stylo-editor></stylo-editor>

The component needs to find place at the same level because its UI elements are absolute positioned.

Once added, provide a reference to your container.

// Your editable element
const article = document.querySelector('article[contenteditable="true"]');

// Stylo
const stylo = document.querySelector('stylo-editor');

// Set the `containerRef` property
stylo.containerRef = article;

Config

The editor is provided with a default configuration. It can be customized by setting the property config of the <stylo-editor/> component.

For more information:

• i18.d.ts for the list of languages
• config.store.ts for the default plugins and toolbar configuration

Plugins

A plugin is a transform function that adds a new paragraph to the editable container.

You can contribute by adding new plugins to this repo or create custom plugins for your application only.

The list of plugins available at runtime by the editor is fully customizable.

Development

Stylo exposes interfaces and utilities to ease the development of new plugins. Basically, a plugin should provide:

• text: the text, a string, displayed to the user in the UI popover
• icon: an icon displayed to the user in the UI popover. it can be one of the built-in icons (src/types/plugin.ts) or an inline SVG - i.e. an SVG provided as string
• createParagraphs: the function that effectively create the new paragraph(s), add these elements to the DOM and can optionally give focus to the newly created first or last element

For example, a plugin that generates a new paragraph that is itself a Web Component name <hello-world/> would look as following:

import {
  createEmptyElement,
  StyloPlugin,
  StyloPluginCreateParagraphsParams,
  transformParagraph
} from '@papyrs/stylo';

export const hr: StyloPlugin = {
  text: 'My Hello World',
  icon: `<svg width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 512 512">
        ...
    </svg>
  `,
  createParagraphs: async ({container, paragraph}: StyloPluginCreateParagraphsParams) => {
    // Create your Web Component or HTML Element
    const helloWorld = document.createElement('hello-world');

    // Set properties, attributes or styles
    helloWorld.setAttributes('yolo', 'true');

    transformParagraph({
      elements: [helloWorld, createEmptyElement({nodeName: 'div'})],
      paragraph,
      container,
      focus: 'first'
    });
  }
};

In addition, it is worth to note that createParagraphs is a promise. This gives you the ability to hi-jack the user flow to trigger some functions in your application before the DOM is actually modified. As for example opening a modal after a plugin as been selected by the user.

Things to pay attention to:

• when users are using your plugins, they should not end up trapped not being able to continue editing and create new paragraphs. That's why we advise to generate an empty div (in above example createEmptyElement) at the same time as your element(s)
• Stylo expect all the direct children - the paragraphs - of the editable container to be HTML elements i.e. no text or comment nodes

Find some custom plugins in DeckDeckGo repo.

Toolbar

The inline editor that is uses to style texts (bold, italic, colors, etc.) is a web component named <stylo-toolbar/>.

It is used per default with Stylo on desktop but can also be used as a standalone component.

Because mobile devices are already shipped with their own tooltip, the toolbar is not activated by Stylo on such device.

Menus

Optionally, menus can be defined for particular elements - i.e. paragraphs. They will be displayed with an absolute positioning after click events.

Custom menus can be configured following the (src/types/menu.ts) interface.

If for example you would like to display a custom menu for all code paragraphs, this can be done as following:

export const editorConfig: Partial<StyloConfig> = {
  menus: [
    {
      match: ({paragraph}: {paragraph: HTMLElement}) => paragraph.nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'code',
      actions: [
        {
          text: 'Edit code',
          icon: `<svg ...
          </svg>`,
          action: async ({paragraph}: {paragraph: HTMLElement}) => {
            // Apply some modifications or any other actions of your choice
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
};

Stylo provides a sample menu for images (src/menus/img.menu.ts).

Events

If you are using a rich text editor, there is a chance that you are looking to persist users entries and changes.

For such purpose, the <stylo-editor/> component triggers following custom events:

• addParagraphs: triggered each time new paragraph(s) is added to the editable container
• deleteParagraphs: triggered each time paragraph(s) are removed
• updateParagraphs: triggered each time paragraph(s) are updated

Each paragraph is a direct child of the editable container.

Unlike addParagraphs and deleteParagraphs that are triggered only if elements are such level are added or removed, updateParagraphs is triggered if the paragraphs themselves or any of their children (HTML elements and text nodes) are modified.

Stylo can detect changes for paragraphs and elements that are added or updated but cannot detect deleted paragraphs without a hint. The Mutation Observer API does not provide yet enough information. To overcome this issue, Stylo set an attribute with empty value to identify what elements are paragraphs.

Changes following keyboard inputs are debounced.

Attributes

Following attributes are ignored to prevent the observer to trigger and keep track of changes that are not made by the user on purpose:

• paragraph_id: the attribute added to identify each paragraph
• placeholder: the attribute used by Stylo to display the placeholder about the '/'
• class: only inline style is considered changes
• spellcheck
• contenteditable
• data-gramm, data-gramm_id, data-gramm_editor and data-gr-id: Grammarly flooding the DOM

The list of excluded attributes and the paragraph_id hint can be customized through the configuration (src/types/config.ts).

Listener

If you are manipulating the contenteditable - i.e. the DOM - on your side, you might want to add these changes to the "undo-redo" history.

For such purpose, the editor is listening for the events snapshotParagraph of type CustomEvent<void> that can be triggered from the child of the editable element you are about to modify.

Contributing

We welcome contributions in the form of issues, pull requests, documentation improvements or thoughtful discussions in the GitHub issue tracker.

To provide code changes, make sure you have a recent version of Node.js installed (LTS recommended).

Fork and clone this repository. Head over to your terminal and run the following command:

git clone [email protected]:[YOUR_USERNAME]/stylo.git
cd stylo
npm ci
npm run start

Before submitting changes, make sure to have run at least once a build (npm run build) to generate the documentation.

Tests suite can be run with npm run test.

This project is developed with Stencil.

i18n

English, German, Spanish and Dutch are currently supported. More translations are also welcomed!

Contributions

• add a new translation file in src/assets/i18n
• extends the list of supported Languages in src/types/i18.d.ts
• update README with the new language

Customization

The text options of plugins and menus can either be static string or a translation keys.

To provide a list of custom translations that matches these keys, Stylo accepts a custom record of string (src/types/config.ts).

Through the same configuration it is also possible to switch languages on the fly.

License

MIT © David Dal Busco and Nicolas Mattia