Meta (formerly Facebook) recently open- sourced a project on GitHub called Lexical, a JavaScript-based web text editor framework that is extensible, accessible, and high-performance. Meta said in the introduction that combined with Lexical's highly extensible architecture, developers can build unique text editors that are scalable in both size and functionality.
At its core, Lexical is a text editing engine - a platform for building feature-rich editors for the web. To avoid users rewriting the same rich text functionality in each implementation, Lexical also exposes a set of separate, modular packages through which functionality such as user interface components, toolbars, rich text functionality and markup can be accessed to implement and expand.
Lexical's underlying engine mainly consists of three parts:
- Editor instances, each attached to an editable content element.
- A set of editor states representing the current and pending state of the editor at any given time.
- A DOM modifier that takes a set of editor states, differentiates the changes, and updates the DOM based on its state.
At its core, Lexical is designed to be as simple as possible. Take UI components, toolbars, rich text, and Markdown for example, which can logically be included through a plugin interface and used when needed. This ensures great scalability and keeps code size to a minimum.
Browser Compatibility:
- Firefox 52+
- Chrome 49+
- Edge 79+（Chromium）
- Safari 11+
- iOS 11+ (Safari)
- iPadOS 13+ (Safari)
- Android Chrome 72+
Note: Lexical does not support Internet Explorer or older versions of the Edge browser. Lexical is currently in an early development stage and the API and packages are subject to change.