Should TriliumNext explore alternative editors/depart from CKEditor?

[rom1dep]

CKEditor has been very central to Trilium (and in fairness, possibly to its success), but, from a look at the issues tracker, it is also a recurrent point of friction and frustration (I listed my own).

I find it interesting to survey whether departing from CKEditor should be a goal for TrilliumNext or not, especially in light of other opensource note-taking apps often rolling-out their own (some being even great!).

Some examples:

• siyuan
• logseq
• joplin
• lexical (used by standardnotes)
• quill
• prosemirror

Some discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089460
https://discuss.prosemirror.net/t/differences-between-prosemirror-and-lexical/4557

personal take: siyuan has some great editing capabilities/UX, lexical looks very promising

---

list (to be continued!) of known issues/limitations with CKEditor that a replacement candidate would rather not exhibit:

• impossible to collapse bullets: [Request] Collapsable bullets zadam/trilium#1850
• caret navigation and selection is broken when references are inserted at the end of the line or immediately after the current caret position
• no stable block reference (impossible to embed blocks/paragraphs across notes): (Feature request) Block clone like notes zadam/trilium#4533
• no capability for multi-columns edition: Column support notes? zadam/trilium#4654

list (to be continued!) of desirable features to have:

• rich text formatting
• content embedding (image, sound, video)
• other notes transclusion
• table of content

edit: added prosemirror and quill

[eliandoran]

@rom1dep , I believe at least for now we shouldn't replace it, but keep it alongside.

My dream is to have support for multiple editors. Just like you can choose to have a code note, a Mermaid note, you can have a CKEditor note as well as any other editor you can dream of that we can integrate. This would require a modularization of the application, more explicitly extracting the CKEditor into some kind of plugin and do the same for the new editor. Then we can have Notion-like spreadsheets support and whatever we can dream of.

We also have to consider that existing users' notes are based on CKEditor, which has its own layout in HTML. I think these can't be seamlessly ported to something else without causing potential issues.

The examples you have given seem quite nice. Can you have a look to see which one would be the best candidate? Bonus points for fully open-source ones. I'm a bit tired of seeing a lot of features in CKEditor that are hidden behind a paywall (premium features).

[eliandoran]

@rom1dep , honestly regarding using a Markdown editor is not the best option in my opinion (hot take?). I feel that the WYSIWYG experience that CKEditor (and potentially other editors offer) is net superior for getting work done. For example I use a lot of tables including images at work and that would be horrendous under Markdown unless you use some kind of hacks such as blocks

I wouldn't want us to degrade the experience of Trilium Notes by using an editor that offers less than what CKEditor already offers.

At a first glance from the Lexical playground, it does seem quite interesting. Do you think you could do some kind of comparison of CKEditor vs Lexical? What benefits would we have from switching to it?

[rom1dep]

honestly regarding using a Markdown editor is not the best option in my opinion (hot take?).

not a hot take, I only brought up Markdown as an exchange/intermediate format to explore for conversion. I do think it's important not to force users into markdown.

Do you think you could do some kind of comparison of CKEditor vs Lexical? What benefits would we have from switching to it?

I think an interesting thing to do would be to consolidate a "list of problems with CKEditor" from scanning through open issues, and then to see if/which alternatives solve those. I will edit my original post with a short list from the top of my head, and welcome contributions

[zerebos]

I like the idea of supporting multiple editors! It would also allow us to support markdown editors for those that prefer it without us having to compromise on WYSIWYG for the vast majority of users!

[bwat47]

WYSIWYG is one of the primary reasons I use trillium over the sea of markdown-based notes programs out there. I strongly dislike markdown.

For example, I work in technical support and I use trillium for my personal knowledgebase of technical support notes. This includes many canned replies that I often copy into emails. If I copy formatted text and paste it in an email, I need the formatted text.

I've tried so many notes programs where it will display the formatted text in the notes program, but when pasting into an email, I get the plain markdown. I then promptly uninstall that program and go back to trillum :D

[Byteingpython]

Having an editor with great markdown support doesn't mean not being WYSIWYG. Even the current editor has some level of markdown conversion. And as you already said it is a WYSIWYG editor

[meichthys]

I can also say that the Siyuan editing experience is very nice.

[cjrutherford]

Siyuan looks like if Obsidian and Notion had offspring. that's not a bad thing.

[shutaozhenzhen]

Ckeditor is clearly the source of many of trilium's problems, but it's clear that replacing Ckeditor isn't the most important thing right now, and it would be a major change that should be dealt with after it's stabilized (and worth releasing a new version).
Moreover, many online editors can available as plugins to trilium, making the problem less pressing.

[cjrutherford]

Agreed with this, it's a consideration between improving the experience for the user AND the developer. Have the issues been transferred? I'd like to see what the problems are and try to understand why they're there.

[meichthys]

#79

[flysaber]

On the contrary, I think the editor experience of Siyuan is very poor and not smooth at all.

[eliandoran]

@flysaber , sounds interesting. Could you share some examples?

[Dialga]

Add https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy to your list, they have their own editor.
Edit: see also https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook.

[rom1dep]

It doesn't look like they package their editor as a separate library, or am I missing something? If not, it might become extremely difficult to vendor in a project like this.

[b-jordanov]

I have tried Appflowy for a good amount and moved to Trillium. Their editor is intuitive. I love it that I don't have to use the mouse just press / and select what type of block I need with the keyboard .

I like that we can keep the notes in .md and organize them and I also notice the CK Editor limitations. I would love to overcome them. I also tried siyuan and I liked it a lot, except it comes with it's own boundaries in how the UI looks and acts.

Even tough they went FOSS a while ago I'd still prefer to stick with Trillium at least for now but I'm glad to see a discussion about a better editor because it's definitely a must.

[Alumniminium]

I wish trilium had Dillinger as edtior. https://dillinger.io/

I just want to write markdown and have proper markdown rendering

[CrO2Cl2]

I do also think that Trilium should have a LaTeX-first editor, for the ones of use that nearly only write in LaTeX. One of the renderers I can think of that work really well is Mathpix Markdown. shouldnt be too hard to implement, and is documented very well. SMILES support is also a plus

[arcqus]

Hello
Joplin's editor is just a shame (and the reason I'm here). It is full of bugs (add or remove lines randomly, bullets badly managed...) and very poor from a end-user standpoint.
As far as I understand, it is related to the use of markdown.
Personally, I'm looking for a MS OneNote-like solution, and trilium was the closest I got.

[Byteingpython]

I think a new default editor should at least have good support for people prefering their keyboard over their mouse. For me that would be full markdown compatibility and a vim mode. It can be WYSIWYG but it must support automatically converting every part of the markdown syntax to its own format.

[b-jordanov]

I completely agree, touching the mouse loses me so much time but the most important part of this reply is "it must support automatically converting every part of the markdown syntax to its own format"

[XingSc29]

Agree too

[meichthys]

Issue created for this: #79

[meichthys]

Some of the pending feature requests are at least somewhat limited by our current editor (CKEditor5). For the most part, CKEditor does support the functionality to implement some of these feature requests, but the needed CKEditor functionalities are premium features that are behind a paywall.

However! CKEditor states the following on their open source page:

How we support Open Source

We grant a free CKEditor 5 license to Open Source projects released under a license incompatible with GPL2+.

- Terms & Conditions:
- Your project needs to be released under an [OSI-approved license](https://opensource.org/licenses/category).
- Your source code needs to be publicly available.
- Your software must not enter into direct competition with our products.
- You must contact us to obtain a license.

It would take a bit more research to see if we qualify and what features we would get in this OpenSource License, but it sure is worth investigating.

Some of the feature requests that could be solved by a 'fuller' CKEditor are:

• Right to left language support #97
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/getting-started/setup/ui-language.html#righttoleft-rtl-languages-support
• Document outline / TOC (We have this already, but perhaps this would be more 'native')
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/document-outline.html
• better math support/ LaTeX #73
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/math-equations.html
• Slash Commands
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/slash-commands.html
• Grammar Check
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/spelling-and-grammar-checking.html
• AI features
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/ai-assistant/ai-assistant-overview.html
• Collaboration
  • https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/features/collaboration/real-time-collaboration/real-time-collaboration.html?docId=e4b3de894eeff72d0669e1d176c84766c

[CrO2Cl2]

it sounds like a really cool idea. It would also finally mean that we support full LaTeX, collaboration ( when we add multi user ), and better exports (as reqested not too long ago),

[eliandoran]

@meichthys , I think the license itself is only to gain access to the base functionality, not the premium ones. For premium features it says:

This is a premium feature, and you need a license for it on top of your CKEditor 5 commercial license. Contact us to receive an offer tailored to your needs.

But indeed it might be worth contacting them to see if they have an offer for premium features for open-source and how it would work. I'll give it a try.

[meichthys]

I remember I asked Zadam about this as well in the past and I don't think he ever got a license from CK editor so this might be something different (or at least i hope so!)

[meichthys]

Here is a better description of their licensing on their forum: https://support.ckeditor.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002452529-Under-which-licenses-does-CKEditor-come

[CobriMediaJulien]

Did sb. allrdy contact them?

[kryoqa]

I am not a developer but can any of the following be used for trilium ?

[https://github.com/toeverything/blocksuite](Blocksuite - Affine)

[https://github.com/treehousedev/treehouse](Treehouse - Front end similar to Tana)