I think most people would love to the know the 'why'. This page discusses differences with prosemirror and is the closest I got to that question: (https://wordgard.net/docs/prosemirror/).
One thing to note is that there is not an upgrade path. Many concepts are shared with prosemirror, but it seems that switching means doing quite some work (correct me if I am wrong). Obsidian is based on Code Mirror so I guess they won't be switching, but tiptap.dev and others do.
@merijn, maybe you could address why wordgard is worth the switching cost?
"Why is it worth the switching cost?" is the genuine question I have too. Or more importantly, why not just make it ProseMirror v2?
The landing page needs more information about the "why" rather than the "what".
This is amusing as well as slightly scary. Prosemirror over the years has become the backbone of editors on the web. ChatGPT uses it. Gemini uses it. Linked chat and feed composers are Prosemirror powered. Literally every serious product uses Prosemirror for composing text on the web.
There is an entire YC company built on top of Prosemirror (Tiptap).
The thought that Prosemirror is no more in active development is scary.
There is contenteditable, which is what all these (Wordgard, ProseMirror) are fundamentally built on. The rest is just the UI, and interop with systems that don't desire arbitrary HTML as input.
~6 years ago had a very hard time researching and implementing an @-style remote resource completion (other users and documents to reference) and the style of extensions in this editor seem very much like an evolution of prosemirror.
I'd really appreciate it this was something built in, not something I have to build based on the dinosaurs example. Every time I need to reach for one of these text editor libraries that is my no. 1 usecase, followed by WYSIWYG.
I can’t believe that we are still trying to solve this. One would think that after so many years (I’ve started doing web almost 20 years ago) we would end up with some solutions baked in browsers
I think the issue is not the "solving", rather that people have different opinions and they want different things, and there isn't common agreement what is needed or how. Most editors work just fine for the basic needs. But well, that is my opinion.
ProseMirror is an excellent project, but it’s always been a bit awkward using it directly in React. I remember that NYT had to rewrite the renderer to make it work for their use-case.
I am not sure if this makes things easier for react interop, but this piece might be of interest too:
> One of the biggest mistake blunders in ProseMirror is that the editor view does not get access to the transaction objects when updating, just the state. Wordgard does not repeat this mistake, and makes updates take transactions, not just a new state.
> This means that things like the DOM update logic and UI plugins can precisely observe what happened, and handle changes in a efficient and more effective way. The weird unexpected DOM redraws that are still a thing in ProseMirror should not occur. Only the precise DOM structure affected by the new transactions will be updated.
Anyways, it is great to see Merijn still going strong with his free work. Anyone needing interactive rich text on the web won't find anything better than his brain childs.
One thing to note is that there is not an upgrade path. Many concepts are shared with prosemirror, but it seems that switching means doing quite some work (correct me if I am wrong). Obsidian is based on Code Mirror so I guess they won't be switching, but tiptap.dev and others do.
@merijn, maybe you could address why wordgard is worth the switching cost?
EDIT: I see many points are addressed in Merijns personal blog. I submitted (https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/wordgard-0.1.html) to HN for better context.
There is an entire YC company built on top of Prosemirror (Tiptap).
The thought that Prosemirror is no more in active development is scary.
It is insane that there isn't a web standard implementation for this passed 15 years ago.
I'd really appreciate it this was something built in, not something I have to build based on the dinosaurs example. Every time I need to reach for one of these text editor libraries that is my no. 1 usecase, followed by WYSIWYG.
I wonder how Wordgard compares in this aspect!
They are also working on a collaborative editing suite for ProseMirror as an alternative to TipTap https://pitter-patter.dev/
I am not sure if this makes things easier for react interop, but this piece might be of interest too:
Anyways, it is great to see Merijn still going strong with his free work. Anyone needing interactive rich text on the web won't find anything better than his brain childs.If the motivation for moving off GitHub was "GH is down too much", it might be worth tracking how many 9's of uptime is lost in the self-hosted case.
Maybe something changed in the meantime, but I'm seeing what appears to be the code for it here: https://code.haverbeke.berlin/wordgard/wordgard/src/branch/m...
Android Chrome.