ianstormtaylor/slate

Slate is a framework for building rich text editors in the browser, targeting applications that need a document editing experience similar to Medium, Dropbox Paper, or Google Docs. Rather than being a ready-to-use editor you drop into a page, it is a toolkit that gives you the building blocks to construct exactly the editing experience you need without fighting against opinionated defaults. The core design principle is that everything is a plugin, including basic behaviors like bold or italic formatting. The document model is a nested, recursive tree structure that mirrors the browser's DOM, which makes it possible to represent complex nested content like tables, block quotes within lists, and embedded media. Changes to the document are expressed as discrete commands that are easy to read and reason about, and the data model is designed with collaborative real-time editing in mind. Slate integrates with React: you write your own rendering components for each content type using standard React code, so there is no separate rendering layer to learn. The library handles selection, keyboard shortcuts, history (undo/redo), and the low-level browser editing events, while you control how content looks and behaves. You would use Slate when building a product that requires a highly customized rich text editor, such as a note-taking app, a blog CMS, an email composer, a collaborative document tool, or any interface where the editor itself is a core product feature rather than a generic textarea. It is not ideal for situations where a simple off-the-shelf editor would do, because it requires more initial setup. The tech stack is TypeScript, built on top of React. It is currently in beta, meaning the core API is stable for most use cases but some advanced APIs may have breaking changes. It is installed via npm as the slate and slate-react packages.