Finding a good and free WYSIWYG editor have always been a struggle. Either they are too basic, bloated or costly. For an upcoming project I was researching the online editors market and was shocked at the outdated results Google presented me with. Search results even mentioned the mythological library JQuery that once dominated frontend development. I got flashbacks to setting up TinyMCE for Drupal or Wordpress and its annoying similarity to MS Office UI with rows upon rows of small buttons. On that backdrop I felt compelled to investigate the editor market and share my findings. Perhaps even remedy the Google search results in time.

The criteria (shamelessly unscientifically and subjective) that defines a good editor is extensibility, customizability and simplicity. Simplicity likewise adheres to the markdown spirit; to focus on the content instead of formatting. That being said, I do appreciate when the editor can generate complex markdown, like tables or snippets as Milkdown does when typing slash. And also that they are under active development or maintenance, as this field is riddled with dinosaurs.

ByteMD

Minimalistic, well-documented, easy to extend via plugins and styling and lightweight.

Links: Web Github Demo

Milkdown

More design and more functionality than ByteMD. And unlike ByteMD where the user writes the actual markdown, Milkdown is a WYSIWYG that renders markdown while writing.

Links: Web Github Demo

Oldies but Goldies

Worthy mentions

This is an editor specifically tailored to create READMEs using “content blocks”. Perhaps this approach could be utilized elsewhere: