Syntax highlighting for markdown input is a good idea. I too have a markdown input and i have two modes for render - either the github style where you manually toggle between editing and rendering or i have two columns with editing on one side and live render on the other.
I too was close to making my own wysiwyg, trello for example has a md wysiwyg, so i knew it was doable with contenteditabe. But after talking with the dev community I was constantly warned by people who took the path before to not do it. So in the end i did not as i did not want to invest more time than i wanted to commit to the project.
Good for you, that you did and you made it to the finish line.
Great project! I was looking into this area too for a while. Any reasons you didn't turn this into a web component? Seems like a no-brainer if I can basically use it like `<overtype-textarea>` or something like that.
Nice! Seems very useful if you can drop in and have everything work.
Nitpicking a bit: it's not as much _rendering_ markdown as it's _syntax highlighting_ it. Another interesting approach there could be to use the CSS Custom Highlight API [0]. Then it wouldn't need the preview div, and perhaps it'd even be possible to have non-mono fonts and varying size text for headers.
Went down the rabbit hole which is the overtype.dev website (nice work btw!) and found and even nicer rabbit hole - https://hyperclay.com/ Single HTML apps :). Enjoy!
This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.)
We lost editing for two reasons:
1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HTML files could only be saved locally.
2) Mosaic built a cross-platform web browser that defined what the WWW was for 99% of users, and they didn't include editing because that would have been too complex to build from scratch in their multi-platform code base.
This reminds me of some of the better experiments in mid-aughts Web dev, and is exactly the kind of project that helps push standards & user expectations forward.
This is pretty nice, though I'd suggest you call it a transparent syntax highlighter.
For https://grack.com/demos/adventure/, I used a hidden <input text> for something similar. I wanted to take advantage of paste/selection and all the other goodies of text, but with fully-integrated styling.
Like you, I found that standard text input boxes were far more interesting than contentEditable because they're just so simple overall.
I think there's probably an interesting middle ground here where you render real markdown with the textarea effectively fully hidden (but still with focus), emulate the selection events of the rendered markup into the textarea, and basically get a beautiful editor with all the textarea solidness.
Fun fact: this is how github adds syntax highlighting in its search bar. A while back I built the same syntax highlighting in Shortwave (an email client) using the same “view on top of a transparent input” trick. Pair it all with the following blog, for a top notch search UX
If it were a WYSIWYG editor, there'd be previews for images. But it seems like it's just syntax highlighting for textareas. Nice project either way, but false advertising.
Really cool! I just love the simplicity of it: has no drawbacks compared to regular textarea, but has lots of benefits. you basically improved textarea, by a lot!
I also made a similar thing a while ago called contextarea.com, maybe, I should add overtype!
Having to use a monospaced font is a pretty big drawback. To me, it means I wouldn't use this for a product that wasn't intended for a techie programmer audience.
Not that it isn't a really cool project! I'm only saying it has clear drawbacks.
What I am wondering is if I can modify the project enough so that lets say when I do # test, then it can automatically modify it to be enlarged instead of just colored/ basically i think that this is how reddit comments work..
Image support would be really preferred too, but honestly, this is seriously so cool that I can iamgine using this right now, but someone here mentioned spell/pell https://github.com/sylvainpolletvillard/spell and https://github.com/jaredreich/pell and so they are in the size of 1kb-2kb, even bytes and this is 40kb iirc, so why is there such a big size difference and how are those guys being so small.
Once again, amazing project, my mind is truly blown by how simple it is, I will try to integrate this or spell or just anything whenever I can!
Looks nice! I like how simple/clean it is. I spent 3+ months building a contenteditable component from scratch for https://sqwok.im, learned a lot and was fun but oh my did it get challenging, especially with cross-browser issues.
what is this tom foolery. I am so amazed by it, this also seems to be a WYSIWYG but though it doesn't support markdown exactly per se but it has way more features than overtype (no offense to overtype which is also a really really cool project)
My mind is utterly blown with what you can do with 912 bytes.
I imagine that I can create a really simple blog post that can load under 14 kb so that it can be sent in a (single request?) while still having comment feature with this one while also being super fast..
It uses queryCommandState(), which is a deprecated browser feature [1]. It's quite common in many simpler WYSIWYG editors. Thing is, it might be so widespread that some people claim that it will never be truly deprecated.
OverType doesn't use this and the result is that you gotta build all the features in JS.
Nice, I was playing around with Milkdown. it's pretty cool: https://milkdown.dev/playground. It's like a block editor like notion for markdown so you don't need the split pane markdown/preview either
I made something similar! https://github.com/andrewbaxter/malarkdowney - The main difference (I think) is that mine applies h* style changes and isn't visually separated from the rest of the page. I.e. it's not just syntax highlighting, it's a more fully-blown output preview.
The text overlay approach doesn't work if you want width-affecting/height style changes (I assume) since that'd cause the overlay to stop matching. The downside is contenteditable cursor movement is broken for inexplicable reasons.
One thing that would be great is a bit better support for lists (todos, unordered and ordered) where when you press enter once it will add another `-` or `- [ ]`, etc item and when you press it a second time it becomes a blank line.
In fact, depending on font-synthesis [1] and the exact choice of fonts (even when they are monospaced), the alignment can be easily off. That's why this approach only works to some extent and not universal. One possible remedy is to wrap each grapheme into a cell that contains both fonts, where the visible one is bolden and the invisible one affects the advance width. But then you lose ligatures. (Personally I don't like ligatures in coding fonts so it's plus for me, though.)
This is a nifty little project. If I wasn't already neck deep in blocknote adoption in a small experiment I'm doing, I'd be taking this for a spin.
I noticed on the site the really cool animation you got has a 1px solid border on one of the overlays in firefox. Figure you might care since it's clearly supposed to be flashy.
As it is, and without the toolbar, this really reminds me of how this[0] neovim plugin renders Markdown in the terminal. One of its nice features is doing syntax highlighting inside fenced code blocks (through tree-sitter I believe).
I used exactly the same approach years ago working on code editor with js evaluation - http://labs.onether.com/javascript-sandbox/ (this is some old version only with whitespace characters, it also had syntax highlighting but i couldn't find it).
This is pretty awesome. Now I’m just a dumbo sysadmin with limited webdev/JS skills, so is there a high level way to integrate this into a site so that it could create MD files that could be saved server side?
The first time I saw this technique was while trying to figure out how GitHub styled the keyword:value tokens in their search box. It's a very cool technique, and you've done a very nice job of integrating it with a markdown parser!
Only down side to it is that you cant apply any padding to the styled inline elements.
I thought it should be extremely portable ("everything just works, it's native"), but it doesn't work on iOS 9.3.6. It doesn't even let me input text into the textarea...
A natural extension seems to be a source code editor with syntax highlighting, like those used in https://marimo.io/, Jupyter, https://plutojl.org/ and other notebook-like Web editors.
I'm not sure why you are testing in iOS 9.3.6. (which was released in 2015), when the documentation says support for Safari is for versions 16 and above.
This is honestly brilliant. I love how you leaned into the constraints instead of trying to hide them, and the transparent textarea trick is such a clever hack. The fact that you got it down to 45KB while keeping undo/redo, mobile keyboard, and accessibility makes it feel like a breath of fresh air compared to bloated editors. Definitely bookmarking this for my next project.
would absolutely love this for a personal note-taking project, but having image support and some sort of auto-completion for commands, lists, tags etc is crucial for something i'd use every day on desktop and mobile.
Still love seeing more options for different purposes.
I have a couple projects I could see this being really useful in, at least as an option instead of pure plain text. I still feel like consumers don't like markdown though, it's frustrating.
One thing I noticed, when doing a list (bullet, numbered etc) it would be great if the list continued on barrage return (enter) - most general users would expect that I think.
I agree with sitkack. npm (packaged software) is really handle to bundle code and keep a repo up to date. But I guess if you just want a markdown editor on a page, this is fine.
If you need to use npm in the rest of the project, which can be helpful for any project that uses front end Javascript, having one library (essentially) that uses a different mechanism is not great.
I have built many projects and while I swore at convoluted bundlers in the past, they are pretty nice these days.
Syntax highlighting for markdown input is a good idea. I too have a markdown input and i have two modes for render - either the github style where you manually toggle between editing and rendering or i have two columns with editing on one side and live render on the other.
I too was close to making my own wysiwyg, trello for example has a md wysiwyg, so i knew it was doable with contenteditabe. But after talking with the dev community I was constantly warned by people who took the path before to not do it. So in the end i did not as i did not want to invest more time than i wanted to commit to the project.
Good for you, that you did and you made it to the finish line.
Great project! I was looking into this area too for a while. Any reasons you didn't turn this into a web component? Seems like a no-brainer if I can basically use it like `<overtype-textarea>` or something like that.
Nice! Seems very useful if you can drop in and have everything work.
Nitpicking a bit: it's not as much _rendering_ markdown as it's _syntax highlighting_ it. Another interesting approach there could be to use the CSS Custom Highlight API [0]. Then it wouldn't need the preview div, and perhaps it'd even be possible to have non-mono fonts and varying size text for headers.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CSS_Custom_...
Can you use highlights on text area contents?
You can't mainly because <textarea> separately tracks its own selection, AFAIK.
The animated exploded demo definitely shows formatting differently from plain text (bold is bold, hyphens replaced with bullets.)
Fair, but so do many syntax highlighters (at least bold, italic, titles...).
Ya that's true
Went down the rabbit hole which is the overtype.dev website (nice work btw!) and found and even nicer rabbit hole - https://hyperclay.com/ Single HTML apps :). Enjoy!
This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.)
We lost editing for two reasons:
1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HTML files could only be saved locally.
2) Mosaic built a cross-platform web browser that defined what the WWW was for 99% of users, and they didn't include editing because that would have been too complex to build from scratch in their multi-platform code base.
I don't say this often or lightly: my mind is blown.
Why is this not catching fire? Especially in the day of vibe coding this is a far better and far more effective route to app building
This reminds me of some of the better experiments in mid-aughts Web dev, and is exactly the kind of project that helps push standards & user expectations forward.
Looks good!
Some links I've collected in the past that describe this approach:
- https://css-tricks.com/creating-an-editable-textarea-that-su...
- https://github.com/WebCoder49/code-input
I believe https://grugnotes.com also does this for markdown.
This is pretty nice, though I'd suggest you call it a transparent syntax highlighter.
For https://grack.com/demos/adventure/, I used a hidden <input text> for something similar. I wanted to take advantage of paste/selection and all the other goodies of text, but with fully-integrated styling.
Like you, I found that standard text input boxes were far more interesting than contentEditable because they're just so simple overall.
I think there's probably an interesting middle ground here where you render real markdown with the textarea effectively fully hidden (but still with focus), emulate the selection events of the rendered markup into the textarea, and basically get a beautiful editor with all the textarea solidness.
Fun fact: this is how github adds syntax highlighting in its search bar. A while back I built the same syntax highlighting in Shortwave (an email client) using the same “view on top of a transparent input” trick. Pair it all with the following blog, for a top notch search UX
https://blog.superhuman.com/delightful-search-more-than-meet...
If it were a WYSIWYG editor, there'd be previews for images. But it seems like it's just syntax highlighting for textareas. Nice project either way, but false advertising.
I can type text, mark it, click "B" for bold and it works. This is WYSIWYG minus images.
I didn’t see an option for images. Am I missing something?
I assume that was the point. The parent commenter feels "WYSIWYG" by definition includes images.
Really cool! I just love the simplicity of it: has no drawbacks compared to regular textarea, but has lots of benefits. you basically improved textarea, by a lot!
I also made a similar thing a while ago called contextarea.com, maybe, I should add overtype!
Having to use a monospaced font is a pretty big drawback. To me, it means I wouldn't use this for a product that wasn't intended for a techie programmer audience.
Not that it isn't a really cool project! I'm only saying it has clear drawbacks.
This is actually really clever. Just don’t let it balloon out to be a 500kb full fledged WYSIWYG editor, just keep it simple like you do.
This is a really good project, kudos!
What I am wondering is if I can modify the project enough so that lets say when I do # test, then it can automatically modify it to be enlarged instead of just colored/ basically i think that this is how reddit comments work..
Image support would be really preferred too, but honestly, this is seriously so cool that I can iamgine using this right now, but someone here mentioned spell/pell https://github.com/sylvainpolletvillard/spell and https://github.com/jaredreich/pell and so they are in the size of 1kb-2kb, even bytes and this is 40kb iirc, so why is there such a big size difference and how are those guys being so small.
Once again, amazing project, my mind is truly blown by how simple it is, I will try to integrate this or spell or just anything whenever I can!
Looks nice! I like how simple/clean it is. I spent 3+ months building a contenteditable component from scratch for https://sqwok.im, learned a lot and was fun but oh my did it get challenging, especially with cross-browser issues.
Love the simplicity. These sort of “less is more” solutions should become more prevalent as average code volume continues to rapidly increase
912 bytes....
https://sylvainpolletvillard.github.io/spell/demo.html
what is this tom foolery. I am so amazed by it, this also seems to be a WYSIWYG but though it doesn't support markdown exactly per se but it has way more features than overtype (no offense to overtype which is also a really really cool project)
My mind is utterly blown with what you can do with 912 bytes.
I imagine that I can create a really simple blog post that can load under 14 kb so that it can be sent in a (single request?) while still having comment feature with this one while also being super fast..
So good that words can't explain lol
It uses queryCommandState(), which is a deprecated browser feature [1]. It's quite common in many simpler WYSIWYG editors. Thing is, it might be so widespread that some people claim that it will never be truly deprecated.
OverType doesn't use this and the result is that you gotta build all the features in JS.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/qu...
Nice, I was playing around with Milkdown. it's pretty cool: https://milkdown.dev/playground. It's like a block editor like notion for markdown so you don't need the split pane markdown/preview either
This isn't really WYSIWYG because it keeps the formatting symbols like * or # etc.
Still, what you see is what you get (plus some formatting symbols). It's marginally WYSIWYG.
I made something similar! https://github.com/andrewbaxter/malarkdowney - The main difference (I think) is that mine applies h* style changes and isn't visually separated from the rest of the page. I.e. it's not just syntax highlighting, it's a more fully-blown output preview.
The text overlay approach doesn't work if you want width-affecting/height style changes (I assume) since that'd cause the overlay to stop matching. The downside is contenteditable cursor movement is broken for inexplicable reasons.
Very cool! So simple, I love it.
One thing that would be great is a bit better support for lists (todos, unordered and ordered) where when you press enter once it will add another `-` or `- [ ]`, etc item and when you press it a second time it becomes a blank line.
In Firefox on Android, the bold font is wider than the upright and italic fonts, breaking alignment.
(It works fine in Chrome on the same Android phone. Android 16, Firefox 141.0.3)
In fact, depending on font-synthesis [1] and the exact choice of fonts (even when they are monospaced), the alignment can be easily off. That's why this approach only works to some extent and not universal. One possible remedy is to wrap each grapheme into a cell that contains both fonts, where the visible one is bolden and the invisible one affects the advance width. But then you lose ligatures. (Personally I don't like ligatures in coding fonts so it's plus for me, though.)
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-synthe...
This is a nifty little project. If I wasn't already neck deep in blocknote adoption in a small experiment I'm doing, I'd be taking this for a spin.
I noticed on the site the really cool animation you got has a 1px solid border on one of the overlays in firefox. Figure you might care since it's clearly supposed to be flashy.
Great idea & solution
I noticed toolbar is missing from options doc, reason I went looking was if I could add my own custom button to the toolbar
Isn't this just syntax highlighting and not wysiwyg?
As it is, and without the toolbar, this really reminds me of how this[0] neovim plugin renders Markdown in the terminal. One of its nice features is doing syntax highlighting inside fenced code blocks (through tree-sitter I believe).
[0]: https://github.com/MeanderingProgrammer/render-markdown.nvim
https://github.com/inokawa/rich-textarea
I used exactly the same approach years ago working on code editor with js evaluation - http://labs.onether.com/javascript-sandbox/ (this is some old version only with whitespace characters, it also had syntax highlighting but i couldn't find it).
Anyway, nice work mate.
Looks awesome. Like the simplicity. I'll keep that in mind for future project ;)
(Btw, there might be a typo on the landing page on the set up part. There is 2 times de <div> instead of the textarea i guess;))
Edit: and the link to the Github is brocken
The idea is that two instances of overtype would be initialized inside those divs!
I also got frustrated with text editors and decided to build something for myself too, so I don't have to repeat the process over and over.
https://www.texteditors.dev
Smart! I’ve been working with contenteditable for 3 years. You found a great shortcut!
This is pretty awesome. Now I’m just a dumbo sysadmin with limited webdev/JS skills, so is there a high level way to integrate this into a site so that it could create MD files that could be saved server side?
Most JS/TS runtimes have filesystem modules, at it's simplest/least secure you could implement it with client-side fetch and:
On get request - find matching .MD file and return
On put request - write to given location
The scroll syncing in the demo doesn’t seem to work well on iOS Safari. I can’t scroll all the way to the bottom.
The first time I saw this technique was while trying to figure out how GitHub styled the keyword:value tokens in their search box. It's a very cool technique, and you've done a very nice job of integrating it with a markdown parser!
Only down side to it is that you cant apply any padding to the styled inline elements.
That is not just a textarea, but it is a pattern seen in many other projects
I thought it should be extremely portable ("everything just works, it's native"), but it doesn't work on iOS 9.3.6. It doesn't even let me input text into the textarea...
A natural extension seems to be a source code editor with syntax highlighting, like those used in https://marimo.io/, Jupyter, https://plutojl.org/ and other notebook-like Web editors.
I'm not sure why you are testing in iOS 9.3.6. (which was released in 2015), when the documentation says support for Safari is for versions 16 and above.
This is cool (and amazingly simple). Would be even cooler than it already is if it would syntax highlight code in code blocks, too.
This is honestly brilliant. I love how you leaned into the constraints instead of trying to hide them, and the transparent textarea trick is such a clever hack. The fact that you got it down to 45KB while keeping undo/redo, mobile keyboard, and accessibility makes it feel like a breath of fresh air compared to bloated editors. Definitely bookmarking this for my next project.
Am I doing it wrong?
The animation shows variable-pitch fonts, but the demo seems to be all the same fixed-pitch font for me. (On Firefox ESR and Chromium.)
Anyone knows a good in browser coding editor widget?
That supports color coding for different languages?
Codemirror is pretty decent. Last time I looked for this (6+ years ago) it's what we landed on for an internal tool. Things may have changed tho!
Minor typo:
> A PEAK UNDER THE HOOD
I think you meant "PEEK"
Can you send the GitHub link again?
And how does this handle rendering larger documents?
Nice job. How is this different than marked on npm?
would absolutely love this for a personal note-taking project, but having image support and some sort of auto-completion for commands, lists, tags etc is crucial for something i'd use every day on desktop and mobile. Still love seeing more options for different purposes.
12 pages of docs vs it’s a textarea. Great job, gonna try it out.
is there a way to show the rendered preview (not with the markdown characters)
2kb
https://medv.io/codejar/
This is great! Gonna try this on my next project
Love this. Pretty much markdown on steroids!
This is really nice
Very cool. I’m gonna implement into my hobby project today and see how it goes.
I really like the simplicity of this.
I have a couple projects I could see this being really useful in, at least as an option instead of pure plain text. I still feel like consumers don't like markdown though, it's frustrating.
One thing I noticed, when doing a list (bullet, numbered etc) it would be great if the list continued on barrage return (enter) - most general users would expect that I think.
very nice!
> That's it. No npm. No build. No config.
That's it, I am loving it.
If it doesn't have an NPM build, it isn't a serious project. Not using anything w/o a build.
If it doesn't work with crack pipes, it's not a serious pharmaceutical.
I agree with sitkack. npm (packaged software) is really handle to bundle code and keep a repo up to date. But I guess if you just want a markdown editor on a page, this is fine.
You are arguing two (subtly) different points. Not requiring npm or any build step is great. Always.
Having it available to simplify integration into larger projects is also great.
These two things are entirely orthogonal, even if this only does the first one.
It's fine that the points are different.
If you need to use npm in the rest of the project, which can be helpful for any project that uses front end Javascript, having one library (essentially) that uses a different mechanism is not great.
I have built many projects and while I swore at convoluted bundlers in the past, they are pretty nice these days.