Can you explain more about how Tiptap’s concepts extend or replace ProseMirror’s concepts?

A few years ago I evaluated rebasing Notion’s editor on various editor frameworks. ProseMirror came out at the top of my list, but I wasn’t sure how to rank TipTap.

Having more batteries included is good, but I’ve found that layers of abstraction can really get in the way. For example if I need to fix a bug with Android Gboard input, without a framework I can exactly control the DOM structure and input handling, but the downside is no one fixes the bug for me. With ProseMirror, I’d need to tunnel through 1 layer of abstraction and/or patch 1 layer of abstraction. With Tiptap, maybe I’d need to fork-and-patch both you and ProseMirror? Each layer also increases our maintenance liability. If the ProseMirror author decides to retire or take the library in a direction that doesn’t work for us, then we need to fork and maintain it. If both you and the ProseMirror do that, we have more code we need to maintain.

Ultimately I decided adopting a library was too risky, and opted to improve our native ComtentEditable handling. Because our product’s selling point is an editor, we want to control our own destiny.

For others who can afford a library but still need to weigh the risks of that abstraction stack, can you share some insights?

> With ProseMirror, I’d need to tunnel through 1 layer of abstraction and/or patch 1 layer of abstraction. With Tiptap, maybe I’d need to fork-and-patch both you and ProseMirror? Each layer also increases our maintenance liability.

As a contributor to the previous version of Tiptap, and as a developer that built extensions into it, I encountered the exact same problem of having to learn two different APIs while trying to build more advanced features.

Out-of-the-box libraries like Tiptap are great when their extensions or components fully cover your use case. But when you need to customize or own the code itself, the secondary abstraction becomes leaky and you start to fight against it.

Because I was building a note-taking app, I spent most of the time working on the rich text editor. Eventually, I just ripped the bandaid off and wrote a new library that was architected off Tiptap but was a thinner abstraction on top of ProseMirror.

With hindsight, I can definitively say that was the better personal choice. The last time I used Tiptap was in 2020, and since then its API has evolved to a point where my knowledge is way outdated. On the flip side, ProseMirror has been extremely stable, improving with a non-breaking typescript rewrite. Digging into the internals of ProseMirror, learning how it has been built and maintained, contributed massively to how I write code today.

That being said, the journey of moving off Tiptap to ProseMirror took a couple of months for a junior dev. So I can understand how a market for it exists. My only wish for Tiptap now is for it to reduce its API overhead on ProseMirror, and instead build more advanced ProseMirror-compatible plugins that require a backend. Collaborative editing (comments, annotations), version control and schema migration, etc are all exercises normally left up to the developer that can be solved by Tiptap well.

I think if the editor is a core piece of your app, you cannot really outsource it. After looking at lexical, ProseMirror, CodeMirror, etc., I am currently rolling my own. Your comments from last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31815209) are helping a lot with that!

I'm happy to help, and good luck!

I can definitely see your point. How many layers do you really need to get a practical abstraction, and how many layers are too many moving parts?

With Tiptap we are trying to make it easy to build modern editors. The demands on the usability of an editor are getting higher and higher because of tools like Notion. Building a tool like this from scratch is pretty hard. That's why we used Prosemirror as a solid foundation, but in our daily work of developing editors for our projects we came to the point that we really need an additional layer of abstraction to reduce recurring code that you don't want to write over and over again. Yes, with our layer we made some decisions about how an editor framework should behave, but with our extension-based architecture in Tiptap, which ProseMirror also has, you can extend both layers separately.

I'm not part of the TipTap team but I think I can help answer this.

Think of it like this... you're basically only coupling yourself to ProseMirror. That's the schema you're storing in your database. TipTap is a set of libraries that you can use for your web app etc... but if you ever find it insufficient, you're free to role your own thing.

ProseMirror has been around for a long time and is unlikely to be going anywhere, but having a company with VC funding using it as its base helps ensure that if ProseMirror got abandoned, it'd likely get picked back up by TipTap or some other interested party.

Even if you're building your own editor, unless your editor has a need that ProseMirror's schema doesn't account for or solve it makes sense to use it.

> having a company with VC funding using it as its base helps ensure that if ProseMirror got abandoned, it'd likely get picked back up by TipTap or some other interested party.

On the contrary, the company with VC may be a bummer after some years and the VC wanted to get ROI: prices started to increase (or appear), change of strategy and abandon/remix the tool, close the store…

Being free and open source surely helps.

Yeah, I share that concern about outsourcing a core competency to a VC funded startup. The risk of abandonment means you need to be ready to fork & maintain all the Tiptap code if they go closed source or shut down.

I totally understand the fear when VC money comes on the table, but not every open source project can be in the Apache or Linux Foundation ;) Most of the money in those organizations also comes from the big names, not from indie hackers sponsoring for them. A lot of people think that open source means free because you don't have to pay for it, but that's wrong.

I think the future of an open source project and the company behind it really depends on the founders. If open source is really in their DNA, they will fight for it. If everything goes wrong, at least the open source code will remain. The closed code will most likely disappear with the company.

Thanks for your feedback! We really need people like you to point out when things are going in the wrong direction. It's often a difficult balance between making money and giving back to the community. So we need your outside perspective!

Currently using TipTap as a higher level abstraction on top of ProseMirror. Mostly for the React node view support which works very well. I try to implement most other stuff as straight ProseMirror plugins.

Shameless plug for some ProseMirror FOSS ecosystem contributions I've recently made:

A commit-based collab plugin that's far more performant under heavily active client loads than stock. I'm a fan of YJS, but not a fan of state-based CRDT layer on top of ProseMirror for my use cases. Wrote about this here: https://stepwisehq.com/blog/2023-07-25-prosemirror-collab-pe... .

I also translated the core ProseMirror projects of model, transform, and test-builder to C# so you can build robust backends in a C# monolith. All tests on those projects have been translated as well. Wrote about this here: https://stepwisehq.com/blog/2023-07-17-announcing-prosemirro... .

Hope to release more FOSS projects along the way; lot of taking from ProseMirror compared to what's given back IMHO(not targeted at TipTap which provides a lot of value). I've got some stuff geared towards minimizing keystroke-to-paint latency which I hope to write about soon. Ideally we will reach a point where we contribute funds to the ProseMirror project.

Cheers!

ducks

Have you tried the nytimes react integration? https://github.com/nytimes/react-prosemirror

It should be lighter than tiptap.

Thank you for your open source contributions and in-depth articles. We think that the field of collaboration is still new and evolving. Because of the pros and cons of the different implementations, we think it might be a good idea to have the choice between libraries like Yjs and Automerge. Would you use it?

Would I use Automerge? Hopefully this isn't TMI :)

I think it would need to clearly be worth the cost. I'm having a hard time imagining use-cases my users would have, and matter enough, that would necessitate it over the commit based backend..

I spent quite a bit of time as an FTE building out a robust-ish and efficient Yjs backend POC. This included refactoring the ProseMirror Yjs bindings into a proper TypeScript project, and specializing them for some funky use-cases. At the end of it all my personal takeaways were:

* State-based CRDT isn't great when you want a central authority in the mix anyway and are fundamentally trying to work with operations

* The exchange rate between ProseMirror's currency, steps, and some other replication strategies building blocks is too high

* ProseMirror should add the concept of range-relocation to its mappings; this is a bit of an aside but it would help retain user intent when reconciling concurrent edits involved in block relocations

As a concrete example for others imagine a knowledge base editor. You want allow certain users ONLY to comment and you want to enforce this on the backend. There are a number of ways this could be implemented but you may want the UX of optimistically allowing them to make that edit in the FE and then submit the ProseMirror steps to the backend. This will typically involve two fundamental ProseMirror steps(of which there are only a few) to set an attribute and set a mark on a node range.

You can relatively easily inspect the submitted changes to verify only the allowed operations are occurring, and authorize the user for them.

However Yjs just cares about syncing state so the documents end up equivalent, and its efficient diff format doesn't really have the info you'd need to determine what's going on. You'd need to have the actual document model loaded, and then diff the docs before/after to figure out exactly what happened. And/or patch into the Yjs binding diff algorithm which works surprisingly well but doesn't produce minimal changes and can often "over edit" the document model.

So something that was relatively simple with ProseMirror steps has become a huge thing with Yjs. And for what?

All that to say, Automerge is supposedly operation based so in theory it sounds like a better route for use cases involving a central authority(which is most if I'm speculating) and want to do extra processing on document operations.. But it'd need to bring a lot to the table to offset the time investment..

I didn't know that. Especially the first approach [1] sounds interesting to me, because as far as I know the transactions of Yjs seem to be a problem on heavily changing documents. Thanks!

[1] https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite#approach-1-history-free...

We have been using Tiptap in production for more than a year in Notesnook[0]. Glad to see it finally launching here on HN!

We have had quite a long and rough ride in search of a stable rich text editor. We began with Quill.js then migrated to TinyMCE and then finally settled on Prosemirror. Unfortunately, contenteditable is still absolutely horrible on web browsers, especially mobile ones.

Tiptap is a good choice if you are looking for a framework agnostic and thin abstraction over Prosemirror. However, if you are primarily working with React you should go with Remirror[1]. Tiptap's APIs are heavily inspired by Remirror (almost a duplicate in some places). Remirror takes the edge on the maturity and stability of the API and extensions. The sheer number of utilities offered by them to simplify Prosemirror's APIs is astounding. And trust me, you will need a lot of those utilities eventually. Prosemirror is not an easy API - really, really well designed but not easy.

In the end, though, its Prosemirror that's doing all the heavy lifting. And no matter how many abstractions you put on it, you will have to get really, really close in with Prosemirror's internals. Tiptap or Remirror do not make that any easier or harder aside from the initial bootstrapping.

[0] https://notesnook.com

[1] https://remirror.io

---

Edit: almost forgot this but the only real selling point of Tiptap is their extensive documentation.

Thank you for your honest feedback. Our goal is to make ProseMirror with Tiptap even easier to use. The demand for modern content editing continues to grow. Tools like Notion have raised the bar. We don't want to hide ProseMirror, we want to complement it.

We believe that a good editor needs not only a frontend, but also easy-to-use backend services that we try to integrate as seamlessly as possible. With our framework-agnostic approach, we support more than just React.

Did you use Remirror? Both Remirror and Tiptap? Or you just investigated Remirror before landing on ProseMirror + Tiptap?

No. I found Remirror quite a while after Tiptap while searching for a more stable React Node View implementation.

The good news, though, is that it's really simple to mix and match Tiptap and Remirror since both of them use Prosemirror internally.

I've found react-prosemirror [1] to be a light ProseMirror React integration that supports node views. I had also considered Remirror before, but its abstraction and internals seem even heavier than Tiptap's.

[1] https://github.com/nytimes/react-prosemirror

I use Tip Tap in SvelteKit and I like it a lot. I'm really glad I chose it over Lexical and other options. Congrats on the recent YC funding! Nice to see a player in this space that isn't from Facebook/React dominant.

The only issue I have encountered with it that I haven't solved yet (I think there are multiple potential paths) is validating/sanitizing data with it.

To parse the content and turn it into raw text requires instantiating TipTap and all the attendant plugins. So even if I want to do a server side check for something like minimum character count, I have to 'decode' the JSON etc...

I know it's not the focus, but something that makes that easier would be nice. And something I could easily add to a Schema checker like Joi or Zod.

> I'm really glad I chose it over Lexical and other options. Congrats

Do you mind expanding on this? I've been comparing the two and found the lexical data model easier to understand.

It doesn't include Lexical, but GitLab did a detailed comparison of rich text editors a while back and settled on Tiptap. Their write-ups are pretty detailed:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/231725

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/273238

The first link shows a discussion that started in July 2020, when Tiptap was only available in version 1. The new major version 2, which is a complete rewrite, was in development. The biggest drawback the GitLab engineers had was the lack of a test suite in Tiptap 1. That's understandable, because as a key component of your application, testing is necessary to ensure that you catch breakable changes. Tiptap 2 does just that. [1]

[1] https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap/tree/develop/tests

Thanks for the links to the discussion, I wasn't aware of it. Seems like a nice long read and find out what others think about us. I will read it.

I'm going to be honest, I did this evaluation several months ago and I don't remember all of the exact points. If I remember:

* I did not like that it was an alternative to a different Facebook rich text editor (draft.js)

* Very React focused (makes sense, it's a Facebook/Meta project) - even applying concepts. Here's an excerpt from their site: "If you've used React Hooks before, you can think of $ functions as being something that follows a similar pattern. These are functions that show their intent as to where they can or cannot be used."

I don't want to use React Hooks or things designed to be like React Hooks.

* Newer and less features/polished. Looking at their official project site, there's way less features already available. That means more custom code you have to write.

* No standard schema/for formatting rich content

Have you tried using Lexical? I found it to be very buggy and ended up replacing it with Quill.

Would you mind elaborating on Lexical? Which parts did you find buggy?

I also liked it a lot, though I used it in React and had a bit of trouble with getting it to play nicely with useEffect.

I see that as an issue with React though, not TipTap. It’s a great editor and I love that it’s headless.

Curious what issues you ran into?

My memory is hazy since it's been a while, but I implemented collaborative editing in TipTap using YJS. This requires coordinating editor state with a socket interface and I had to use a bunch of useEffect trickery to make sure the state didn't get out of sync. I'm afraid I can't elaborate further, but I will say that I'd highly recommend TipTap if you want to build collaborative editing. Once I got it working, it worked perfectly.

Since Tiptap is built on top of ProseMirror, do you contribute funds to support ProseMirror's development?

Since the last few weeks we are focusing on the development of Tiptap. We definitely want to have a solid foundation, so we will support the projects we rely on. Without their work, Tiptap wouldn't be possible.

So, no then.

No, that's a false assumption from my 3-day-old answer, as you can easily see on our GitHub profile: https://github.com/ueberdosis

That was not an assumption, it was literally what you said underneath your spin while not directly answering the question. I’m glad it changed. The fact that it did change does not change the fact that you did not contribute when you wrote your original response, which was what I was addressing.

I don’t appreciate your attempt to paint me as a liar to make your company look better.

What about Yjs?

TipTap uses YJS under the hood for conflict resolution.

Yes, our collaboration backend Hocuspocus uses Yjs.

We know the technologies we rely on, but we also know how important it is to find a sustainable way to maintain an open source project. For a popular project that a lot of other people rely on, this means getting money for development. Since Tiptap is also open source, we can see how the big players are using our project, and sponsor tiny amounts or nothing. We try to do it better than they do, because open source is definitely in our DNA, as it was in our previous work as a digital agency, and now since a few weeks with our focus on Tiptap.

I hope you guys do well, I'm a big fan of the open core model and I really enjoyed using TipTap. This is the client I integrated TipTap with if you're interested in collecting examples in the wild: https://bundleiq.com/

Interesting! How do you get my data into your system to train the AI?

Oh I just did some web development work for them a little over a year ago, where I added collaborative editing. It's an AI-powered note-taking app, with several integrations like Notion and (I believe) Google Docs. I haven't worked with them in a while so they may have changed their model, but once you give them permission they ingest all of that data and weave it into your own notes.

Congrats on the YC funding and the launch! I've enjoyed building https://www.blocknotejs.org on top of TipTap / Prosemirror.

fyi, BlockNote aims to be a bit more batteries-included (comes with UI and block-based editing) - in case headless text-editing libraries are a bit too much work / steep learning curve.

Thanks! We've already found your great project and we're proud to have such a strong community. It's definitely a valid approach to include more batteries. We have been asked many times if we will provide a UI. Right now we're going the "headless path", building more features independent of the exact UI and backend services to improve the editor experience.

This is absolutely marvelous! I've been looking for something just like this. The batteries included aspect matters a lot if you just want the damn thing to work within a larger workflow, and the text editor is just one step along the way. Looking forward to trying it out!

I wish the cheapest non-free tier was cheaper, but I totally agree that building an editor with all the features listed is very time consuming. I love that you are working to tackle this issue!

If I had one request, it would be instead of making me jump from $0 to $150 a month, have a usage-based model similar to OpenAI or Firebase, with functionality so I could cap costs to say $15 a month.

Thank you, this is valuable feedback for us and you’re not the first to say so.

To be honest, we’re still thinking about pricing and I’m sure there will be updates in the (hopefully near) future.

Personally, I’m a big fan of usage-based pricing because it’s the fairest approach. We are also thinking about splitting the price tiers into different modules, e.g. for OpenAI integration, collaboration, maybe support and so on. I said “hopefully in the near future” above because it’s going to be a huge amount of work for us to change that (for example, we have to change our payment provider) and we’re currently focused on other things like implementing new features that our users are asking for most.

What do you think about module-based pricing (in combination with usage-based pricing)?

Module-based would be ideal. For context, I'm building a writing app. I have basic functionality + OpenAI integration, but these things have been a huge pain:

- collaborative editing

- offline editing

- faster loads with sw caching

- git history

- end-to-end encryption.

It's taken me forever to build these, and the code's still not where I want it to be. If you had modules for these that I could pay for, I totally would.

You raised money. Does that mean you're going for a billion dollar exit? What does that path look like, exactly?

Related, I recently started rebuilding the post editor on IndieHackers.com to use Tiptap. Enjoying it so far. I wish your documentation had a few more examples, and better English in some places. But its high quality was part of what attracted me to Tiptap in the first place. I'd love to see y'all continuing to iterate and improve on it!

Good question though! Within the YC program, we're able to do exactly what you mentioned: We can focus on Tiptap and continue to iterate and improve it. Before that, it was quite popular, but it was a side project. A project like this, with the speed at which everything is moving, is time consuming.

We love being part of the open source community, but as I mentioned in another answer, a project like this can't be sustained without the business side in mind. The whole project has been bootstrapped by us in addition to our work at our digital agency. With YC we can focus on the project and develop an ecosystem and harden our open source core, which will always be free for everyone in the future.

We don't have an exit plan, but we have a lot of ideas for more features and want to respond to the community's feedback.

Your PR fixing our bad English in our markdown documentation is always welcome ;) Thank you for your valuable feedback!

Woah, congrats on launching here!

A friend of mine has been using TipTap extensively with his web app and convinced me to look into it a few months ago.

Word doc imports and exports are a really important piece for me and I saw they're in the "Proof of Concept" stage of your idea pipeline.

Do you have any idea when this'll be ready? I'd be happy to help test the feature if it can help!

Top priorities are currently Collab + Version history in collab and improving AI integration. Word doc import and export is one of the next features we definitely want to tackle, but we don't have an exact timeframe yet. I would love to see what you are working on and how you would use word doc import and export.

Does anybody know of a good prose-mirror wrapper for Angular ?

I think TipTap is really cool (and congrats on the launch!), but I hope you won't begrudge me a worry:

I see from your home page and pricing page (https://tiptap.dev/pricing) that you've switched from wording that says "You are free to do whatever you want, TipTap is licensed under MIT" (with support for premium paid plugins), to TipTap being free* (no Credit Card required), and no mention of the MIT license.

This makes me extremely worried that you are eventually going to go the TinyMCE / Froala / CKEditor route, which has made me very hesitant to now use these editors.

I completely understand that WYSIWYG editors are extremely hard to maintain, but on the flipside I now am worried about all the projects I've added / started to add TipTap to. Can you help assuage this worry? Will the core plugin remain free and MIT licensed forever, and not reliant on some sort of usage model outside of premium plugins?

The core of Tiptap (https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap) will remain free and under MIT license. Thanks for your feedback on the pricing page here!

I’ve been playing with TipTap for the last few weeks and really enjoying it! Going Headless seems like a good approach however it’s made rolling out TipTap for a side project tedious as I need to start with styling basic components.

It’d be great to have an 80% use-case coverage for common components.

I’ll call out this wrapper for TipTap + MUI I stumbled on that’s been a nice addition. https://github.com/sjdemartini/mui-tiptap

We think the headless approach is a big factor in why Tiptap has become so popular, but you are right! You can't just add Tiptap to your project without styling. That's why we're always asked about a drop-in Notion-like styling. We don't offer this, but our community has built something that might help you: https://github.com/TypeCellOS/BlockNote

Thanks for the shout-out!

We've been using https://tailwindcss.com/docs/typography-plugin to style our Tiptap and content and it's worked great so far.

Congrats on the launch, and great you'll be dedicating more focus to Tiptap!

If anyone wants to see another example of an app using Tiptap, I built https://duckbook.ai as a fun/free solo project (it's a Notion-like SQL notebook built on Tiptap, DuckDB, and GPT-4).

I evaluated a bunch of editors (ProseMirror, TipTap, Remirror, Slate, Quill, Draft.js, Lexical) and went with TipTap.

I've been generally happy with it, the APIs/docs are good. ProseMirror is super powerful, but large/slow to work with. Tiptap helped me launch a product much faster, but still pop the hood to the ProseMirror layer in a few places where needed.

Main request is to keep the tiptap/core project free and MIT licensed, even if you raise prices on other pieces (like the managed collaboration server).

Duckbook looks promising. I like the clean and neat design! I will share it with my colleagues.

I can take away your fear. The core of Tiptap will always be free and open source. We will do maintenance and improvement, but eventually we have to generate revenue to put Tiptap on a sustainable path. A few weeks ago, the work at our digital agency was funding Tiptap, and it has always been a challenge to balance these two branches.

We are trying to find a good balance between the open source part that a lot of people love and our paid services that give your project your advanced features.

We always think about our pricing model, as we literally do today! Feedback is always welcome to adjust the fine line between our open source and business parts.

Cool, makes sense!

It seems like you're heading in the right direction on packaging/pricing.

Charging for services you manage, more team members, and security features bigger cos care about all make sense to me.

I previously looked at your Pro extensions and some seemed nice to have (UniqueId, emoji), but it wasn't enough to get me to pay, and I rolled my own versions of those instead.

Building multiplayer sync is really tricky, so providing that as a managed service seems valuable and worth paying for. I have no problem paying for services like Clerk.com or Liveblocks.io that involve managed "servers" I don't want to build/run vs a purely client-side library.

I recently discovered Liveblocks, and think their positioning/marketing/docs are great -- the fastest way to turn any SaaS app multiplayer.

I wonder if you could do something similar but focused on all the complexities of text editing (esp since it's such a core primitive for LLMs now). Just a thought - excited to see where you take it!

Thank you for your feedback regarding our pricing!

We know that some individual Pro extensions don't justify the price of the whole tier. That's why we are thinking about selling individual extensions in the future. A lot of people build these types of extensions on their own, which is possible thanks to open source, and that's totally fine. In the last few weeks we have added more value to the paid tiers in the form of the advanced extensions TableofContents, Mathematics and the brand new Tiptap AI. We think it's worth it!

We feel the same about Managed Services. In addition to maintenance, support, development and so on, there are hardware resources that you have to pay for. We think that's fair.

I really like Liveblocks, the slick design, the impressive documentation and the detailed examples. We can learn a lot from them. As a technical decision maker I definitely wouldn't choose it because the backend source is closed source. The collaboration space is still new and there is no real standard in my opinion. The only (de-facto) standard can be an open source solution. In the end, at least the file format has to be interchangeable between a managed cloud and the open source core, regardless of the features around it. A few months ago I thought Yjs might become that standard, but it has too many rough edges. There are CRDTs popping up every month. We'll see.

Tiptap is amazing!! I'm using it to create an electron desktop application to help students plan studies and take notes. The app is greatly inspired by Notion, but given the niche, it will be much simpler and easy to use. Thanks a lot for your effort! I can't see myself creating the app without Tiptap.

Thanks for your feedback! Can we find your electron app somewhere or at least the source code? Desktop and especially mobile apps are a completely different domain for an editor.

I used Remirror, TipTap with React. They were both great but I needed to implement custom editing behavior and that's where they both fall flat. Building your own extensions is poorly documented, and oh, by the way now you will have to learn ProseMirror anyway. Which has a learning curve you don't need.

This even led to me dropping my project, maybe I need to revisit and check if docs improved now TipTap has funding.

Please consider my plea for a keeping a free tier for unfunded startups? Thanks.

When did you try Tiptap? In the last few weeks we have made several improvements to our documentation, but you are right! At a certain point, if you want to do really custom things, you have to put Tiptap aside and dive deep into ProseMirror. The learning curve is pretty steep, and the documentation could use some more step-by-step information. You may have to give it a second try.

We are quite happy with the free tier. We may just make some small adjustments, but I think we'll stick with it!

> The Tiptap AI integration beta is a service where you connect your OpenAI API key to our backend and install the Tiptap editor AI extension to get AI writing experience in your editor. Here’s a demo: https://ai-demo.tiptap.dev/

Congrats, any plan on supporting code/monaco and autocompletion? We had to rebuild it ourselves on top of yjs and gpt4 for windmill.dev and would have happily built it on a service if it existed.

Tiptap AI is still in it’s early stages and we are constantly thinking about how to improve the DX and UX. Autocompletion for text is already working quite well. Our next goals are streaming support for all commands and providing a SDK. Tiptap is primarily a framework for text editing, but we’ll definitely keep an eye on your use cases.

This looks like a great editor. Just a heads up over the name of the project. I've released a browser extension for navigating browser tabs named Tip Tab about 5 years ago [1]. Unfortunately its name is only one letter part from the Tip Tap document editor. Just a clarification to avoid the confusion between the two. Cheers.

[1] https://github.com/williamw520/tiptab

There is also a startup based in Stockholm called Tiptapp. As always, you just want to find a cool name for your side project, do a little research, don't find anything, and later there are projects with similar names that have been around for years.

About three years ago I was looking for an editor and while TinyMCE was the absolute best, its pricing model was as bad as CKEditor's, so I ended up testing Tiptap in a Vue project.

It's really a great and flexible editor, with a couple of rough corners, but overall the only serious alternative to the above-mentioned editors. And since it has a sensible licensing model it is an overall good choice.

As we continue to improve Tiptap, we would be interested in more details about the "rough corners". Do you have any examples?

The main problem had to do with fields inside a custom component not updating the tree (document JSON?) properly. These components could be nested, they had each a title and another variable-content field into which other components could be nested into. The title was a div.contenteditable and I had a hard time getting it to sync with the tree, some components were never able to do this. https://imgur.com/a/qKg9UUs (SFW, apparently imgur has a new policy?)

It might be somewhat similar to the "details" extension, but they were also drag and droppable. The drag and drop support was also somewhat subpar compared with TinyMCE, I ended up using vue.draggable.next to solve the issues, but this added a layer of huge complexity.

Then there was an issue that the UniqueID is a Pro extension and it would have been required for properly storing the document. I now see that pro extensions are free, after registration, but I'm not sure if it was always like this, I think it was coupled to a GitHub sponsorship back then (maybe around August 2021). For a side project which would then sit at rest for some months this wasn't feasible. I think I implemented a custom UniqueId to get around this, but I haven't touched the project for over a year.

About 2 months ago I was thinking about rewriting it in React and see if I could turn it into something, but I haven't found the time.

The pro extensions were not free a few weeks ago, and right now we are experimenting a bit with our free plan. To be honest, we can't give away everything for free. We see the free plan more as a way to find out what Tiptap is and how the additional services can help me reach my goal.

I hope you'll find the time to continue your project.

I'm using Tiptap on writedown (https://writedown.app)

I really like it. The documentation on extensions is a bit lacking but understandable.

One thing I don't really like is the price increase as you got funding. I thought the plans would be cheaper, not 5-7x more expensive post-funding.

As my colleague Sebastian mentioned here [1], we are still in the process of finding the right pricing model. Over the last few months we have added a lot of value to our plans with new extensions and the managed collaboration backend. We also added a free plan to use our services for small hobby projects or to build a prototype to evaluate the use of Tiptap. So we thought it was only fair to change the price. Right now we don't have the option to only pay for the services you need.

Which services do you use? Pro Extensions, Collaboration and/or AI? We are curious about the usage of our services.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961045

We've been happy users of Tiptap at Sudowrite, and recently finished converting 1M+ documents from Quill (with Firebase) into Tiptap (with self-hosted WS Hocuspocus), running admirably @ 50 updates per second. Happy to answer questions on how it's been going.

(psst, we're also hiring!)

We're looking to switch away from Quill to Tiptap, but haven't looked into migration yet.

Would be great to hear any tips or pains you encountered!

That sounds awesome! Would love to hear more about how you set up the migration.

Tiptap is incredible! Built https://novel.sh/ with it and the extensiveness & API is chefs kiss! So proud of you guys and the YC funding is truly well-deserved! Congrats again!

Thank you for contributing to our community with your pretty slick editor. We love seeing all these different UIs out in the wild. It's the goal with our headless approach to be as flexible as needed. I like your AI integration. This is all just the beginning of AI-based content editing.

Congrats Tiptap folks!

I was just playing around with Tiptap last week and build a (very dumb) AI rephrasing app here: https://authored.co. Took a bit to get used to the ProseMirror API, but was a fun experience!

I've been using TipTap to build my side project https://liftnotesapp.com/

The APIs and AST syntax have been very straightforward to work with. Congrats on the launch!

We use Tiptap with vanilla React and it's great. My only wish is for it to have collaborative support beyond JS. Currently support for YJS is very limited if you are not using or can't use JS for the server component.

For now, you could run Hocuspocus as a separate service and write an extension that connects to your application. In our Cloud (https://tiptap.dev/cloud) we send webhooks, so you can process changes or store documents on your side as well.

Somebody already developed an obsidian online version? I know that there are plenty but they all use their own database to store the data and not the good old filesystem.

Congrats on launching and happy to see Tiptap/hocuspocus growing. We are using hocuspocus and sponsored it at the very beginning. Excited to see the whole Yjs community growing.

Thank you for your early support. It means a lot to us! Do you use Hocuspocus with Tiptap or with another editor?

We used TipTap to great effect in an old iteration of our product at credal.ai. It helped us create nuanced text tagging behavior without too much time investment. Would happily recommend it.

Congrats on the launch. I just want to say that I love the name :) It's fun, memorable, evocative of the product's purpose, and rolls off the tongue.

Apparently, we're not the only ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964592

Are these editors mobile responsive? Or is this something you see more as being used for desktop / cloud based editors?

Marijn, the ProseMirror author, does an excellent job building fully responsive frameworks. Out of the ContentEditable libraries I’ve tested, ProseMirror did the best on Android, which is the most challenging platform to support. His CodeMirror is by far the best code editor for mobile too. Monaco, the VS Code editor component, is pretty broken on mobile.

I was just about to write the same thing. Adding here, the headless approach allows you to optimize your editor for mobile pages from a UI perspective.

Note: https://github.com/yjs/yjs for collaborative "document edition, and user cursors"; has WebRTC, web socket, matrix.org backend

We started using Tiptap recently and was surprised that it was not a brand new solution! We like it very much so far

As mentioned here, [1] GitLab decided to use Tiptap 1 back in 2020.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36959404

Will schema versioning be coming to hoscuspocus or will this be locked behind a paywall? We’ve sponsored tiptap for a while now and I’d hate to be locked out of features because we need to self host.

Schema versioning is something I would really like to see in Hocuspocus, but it is currently not scheduled. So it will be a while before we tackle this topic. Currently we are building version history so that you can have a Google Docs-like history of your documents. Version history will not be available in the freeplan.