Scribe Editor

Lightweight rich-text editor core with a modern demo UI, fixed toolbar workflow, and a minimal API.

Website: https://scribejs.top

What's new in v1.0.1

Cross-browser toolbar fixes

Toolbar state (bold / italic / underline / strike / etc.) is now identical across Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Selection handling

• Normalized selection layer abstracts window.getSelection() and Range differences.
• Handles collapsed, backward, multi-node, and text-vs-element selections uniformly.
• Full iframe editing context support via ownerDocument.defaultView.

Toolbar state detection

• No longer relies on deprecated document.queryCommandState / queryCommandValue.
• Walks the DOM tree from the selection range, inspecting parent nodes for active marks (<b>, <strong>, <i>, <em>, <u>, <s>, <strike>, <code>, <a>, <blockquote>, <ol>, <ul>, headings).
• Alignment detected via getComputedStyle with cross-window safety.

Safari fixes

• Selection saved before every toolbar click and restored after action.
• Prevents selection reset that Safari applies on button focus.

Firefox fixes

• selectionchange timing gaps handled via multi-event pipeline (formatChange, change, focus, blur).
• Mutation-safe selection refresh on every DOM change.

Polling safety net

• 100 ms interval while editor is focused force-refreshes FormatState from SelectionManager.
• JSON-diff guard ensures React only re-renders when state actually changes.
• Interval stops on blur and cleans up on unmount.

Event model

• Supports selectionchange, beforeinput, input, keyup, mouseup.
• formatChange event emitted synchronously after every command execution and DOM normalization.

Command registry

• All toolbar items driven by CommandMeta — icon, label, shortcut, group, active() function.
• Fixed and floating toolbars share the same metadata; no duplicated logic.

DOM normalizer (5-phase pipeline)

1. Structural cleanup (empty nodes, whitespace)
2. Inline mark merging (adjacent <b><b> → single <b>)
3. Block-level normalization
4. List structure repair
5. Final whitespace pass

Table of contents

• Features
• Screenshots
• Download
• Usage
• Development
• Documentation
• API
• Plugins
• Support
• License

Features

• Inline-first editing with a fixed toolbar experience.
• Simple, typed API with direct method calls.
• Built-in HTML sanitization and safe paste handling.
• Extensible plugin architecture.
• Framework-agnostic core for integration anywhere.

Screenshots

API	Inline Toolbar	Fixed Editor

Download

• NPM: npm i scribejs-editor
• CDN: https://unpkg.com/scribejs-editor
• Git: git clone https://github.com/GoodPHP/scribejs

Usage

import { createEditor } from 'scribejs-editor';

const editor = createEditor({
  target: '#editor',
  placeholder: 'Start typing...'
});

editor.bold();
editor.link('https://example.com');

const html = editor.getHTML();

React wrapper

import { ScribeEditor, type ScribeEditorRef } from './components/scribe';
import { useRef } from 'react';

function App() {
  const editorRef = useRef<ScribeEditorRef>(null);

  return (
    <ScribeEditor
      ref={editorRef}
      toolbar="fixed"
      placeholder="Write something..."
      onChange={(html) => console.log(html)}
    />
  );
}

Development

npm install
npm run dev

When the dev server starts, it prints the local URL to open the demo.

Documentation

• Demo UI: index.html + public/demo.css + public/demo.js
• Build output: dist/index.js (browser ESM)
• Types: types/index.d.ts
• Source: src/

API

Common editor methods used in the demo:

• editor.bold() / editor.italic() / editor.underline()
• editor.heading(1 | 2 | 3) / editor.paragraph() / editor.blockquote()
• editor.orderedList() / editor.unorderedList()
• editor.link(url) / editor.unlink()
• editor.setFontSize(size) / editor.setFontFamily(family)
• editor.setColor(color) / editor.setBackgroundColor(color)
• editor.getHTML() / editor.getText() / editor.isEmpty()

Plugins

Scribe is built with a plugin-first architecture. Add only what you need and keep bundles lean.

• Built-in plugins live in src/plugins/
• External plugins can wrap common behaviors (toolbars, history, selection helpers)

Support

If you use Scribe in production, consider sharing feedback or contributing improvements.

License

BSD-3-Clause