What is trix compared to other rich text editors?

Trix overview

Used by ActionText as its front-end, the Trix editor- a rich text editor- provides the user with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. It is developed by Basecamp, the creators of Ruby on Rails, and is gaining popularity. Trix makes designing the user interface simple as there is a real-time graphical representation of the changes you make while it generates and renders the underlying HTML required.

Trix can be used to write articles, explanations and generally to compose formatted text for your web applications.

Trix vs other editors

There are several other Rich Text editors in competition to Trix. The most popular ones include CKEditor, TinyMCE and Froala. Regarding the features offered by each of these editors, there are only minor differences compared to Trix. Like CKEditor being less user-friendly, Froala having a more modern interface, TinyMCE not supporting file upload.

However, the major difference that sets Trix apart is that such conventional WYSIWYG editors are created based on Microsoft’s contenteditable and execCommand APIs. Owing to the lack of formal documentation on these APIs, and because the scope of generally all WYSIWYG HTML editors is huge, each implementation of these APIs corresponding to different browsers introduces a new set of bugs and inconsistencies. Trix, however, avoids this by treating contenteditable as an input-output device instead. Thus, when you send something as an input to the editor (like a keystroke), Trix transforms this input into an editing operation on the backend and then renders the document again to reflect the effects of the input on the editor. Due to this, Trix entirely removes the need to use the execCommand API.

Conclusion

Several other editors make a compelling alternative to Trix, but if you need a less quirky editor that gives you consistency and more control over your editor outputs, like if you want it to generate something besides HTML, then the Trix editor is a good choice.

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