Lightweight Rich Text Editor

Question

I am looking for something very simlar to the SO WMD markdown editor that is extremely lightweight but I would like the text area to display the "preview" as you type. I have looked into many Rich editors but they are all seem to do everything under the sun. All I really want is Bold, Italic, Link, Image, and Lists (ordered/unordered).

Answer 1

The most lightweight way to go would be to roll your own. The simplest way to do it would be to use Javascript to react to changes to a <textarea>, and then update a <div> underneath it with the Markdown translated. A good Markdown implementation in Javascript is Showdown.

Answer 2

I have just created this Rich Text Editor plugin that is focused to be used on public text editor such as comment form and/or Q/A form in a forum. It accept inline HTML only by default, but some hacks can be created to expand the limitation.

https://github.com/taufik-nurrohman/rich-text-editor

Basic Usage

The CSS:

  <link href="rich-text-editor.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

The HTML:

  <textarea></textarea>

The JavaScript:

  <script src="rich-text-editor.min.js"></script>
  <script>
  var editor new RTE(document.querySelector('textarea'));
  </script>
</body>

Answer 3

I'm a big fan of FCKeditor.

This HTML text editor brings to the web much of the power of desktop editors like MS Word. It's lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation on the client computer.

http://www.fckeditor.net/