Quick start

A rich content editor that lives in your app, from one feature registry.

A blog post, a help page, a legal notice: the long-form text a product carries is usually edited somewhere else and pasted in. This module puts the editing surface inside your own app, built on Plate and the kit's own primitives. Headings, marks, links, lists, quotes, tables, callouts, images with upload, and embeds each come from one feature definition, and the toolbar, the slash menu, the floating toolbar, the reader-side renderer and the HTML serializer are all derived from that list.

This is the real component. Select text for the floating toolbar, type / for a block, drop an image on the canvas.

Install

bun add @hoplallc/ui platejs @platejs/basic-nodes @platejs/link @platejs/list @platejs/indent @platejs/table @platejs/resizable @platejs/layout @platejs/slash-command @platejs/combobox @platejs/markdown remark-gfm

@import "@hoplallc/ui/styles/sources.css";
@import "@hoplallc/ui/styles/content-editor.css";

Peers: react@19, react-dom@19, tailwindcss@4. The Plate packages are optional peers of the kit: a host that never imports content-editor never installs them.

The 3-minute win

The editor is controlled: you hold the document, it reports changes. A document is a Slate tree, plain JSON your database stores as it is.

import {
	type ContentValue,
	ContentEditorField,
	createContentFeatures,
} from "@hoplallc/ui/content-editor";
import { useState } from "react";
 
// Built once, outside the component: the editor's configuration, not its state.
const FEATURES = createContentFeatures();
 
export function PostBodyEditor() {
	const [body, setBody] = useState<ContentValue | null>(null);
	return (
		<ContentEditorField
			features={FEATURES}
			value={body}
			onChange={setBody}
			onUploadImage={async (file) => {
				// Upload to your own storage, resolve with the url.
				const { url } = await uploadImage(file);
				return { url };
			}}
		/>
	);
}

Omit onUploadImage and every image affordance disappears. Pass toolbar={false} for a chrome-less field, mode="single-line" for one paragraph, readOnly to show the document without editing it.

Arranging it differently

ContentEditorField is the parts put together the usual way. Compose them yourself for another arrangement; every part renders a sensible default with no children.

<ContentEditor.Root features={FEATURES} value={body} onChange={setBody}>
	<ContentEditor.Layout stickyToolbar>
		<ContentEditor.Toolbar />
		<ContentEditor.Canvas />
		<ContentEditor.CharacterCount />
	</ContentEditor.Layout>
	<ContentEditor.FloatingToolbar />
</ContentEditor.Root>

Mental model

A feature is one object: its Plate plugins, its canvas element, its toolbar and slash items, and its reader half, which renders the node to React and to an HTML string. createContentFeatures() returns the built-in ones; add your own, drop what you do not want, reorder them. The reader halves are exported on their own from @hoplallc/ui/content-editor/reader, so a server build that only renders stored content never loads Plate.

API

Plus the DOM props of the element it renders. Source: content-editor/components/content-editor-field.tsx.

Page map

• Presets: a document, a mail, a campaign email.
• Blocks: text, marks, headings, lists, quotes, dividers, tables, callouts, code blocks.
• Media and embeds: images with upload, video, files, YouTube, X.
• Files and drop: dropped and pasted files, and the attachments they become.
• Keyboard: the keys, the same as in Gmail and Notion.
• Inspector and fields: the settings of the selected element, beside the canvas.
• Defining a feature: a block from a list of fields and a view.
• Variables: a recipient's name, typed as {{.
• Columns: one to four columns side by side.
• Email blocks: every block of the email preset, one page each.
• Rendering an email: the email you send, from one exhaustive switch.
• Toolbar and slash menu: the chrome, and how to compose it.
• Custom features: a node kind of your own, in one definition.
• Labels and theming: every string and every size the host owns.
• Markdown: the round trip, and what it loses.
• Server-side rendering: the reader entry, contentToHtml and ContentRenderer.