Skip to main content

Open-source WYSIWYG editors: not quite there yet?

I'm looking for a free HTML editor suitable for end-users that are less comfortable entering html in a textarea. The most advanced open-source projects that fit this description seem to be xinha, a fork of the discontinued HTMLArea, and FCKEditor. Both suffer from problems with corrupting the browser history; bug reports are here and here (and here too). I note though that blogger's proprietary editor doesn't have this problem.

Breaking my back button is a serious usability problem. I note that both of these projects have huge amounts of features, far more than Blogger does. This would actually be a drawback to me if I were to deploy one, since I'd have to figure how to turn all the bloat off. Perhaps a project that focused less on features and more on usability could succeed better here.

(Please, if there's one out there that I missed, point me to it.)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Try Tinymce ( tinymce).

Very easy to integrate, very easy to strip-down ...
Anonymous said…
Though it does have a lot of features too,
you might be interested in checking out Kupu:

http://kupu.oscom.org
Jonathan Ellis said…
I will check those out. Thanks!
Anonymous said…
Check out FreeTextBox at http://www.FreeTextBox.com. They have a free version and another that costs something like $50.
Ian Bicking said…
I haven't looked closely at TinyMCE, but I was fairly happy with HTMLArea in the past, and am planning to use Xinha in the future -- my biggest problem with HTMLArea was the opaque development methodology, which is exactly why Xinha exists.

Popular posts from this blog

Python at Mozy.com

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod

A review of 6 Python IDEs

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren