If anyone has been looking for a Rich Text editor ...

# compose-desktop

[Adam Brown]

If anyone has been looking for a Rich Text editor composable, I ported a Jetpack compose library someone made to multiplatform compose (w_ith the original authors blessing_) https://github.com/Wavesonics/richtext-compose-multiplatform it's still pretty early, but I'm continuing to work on it.

[james]

nice work! you might also be interested in this, which I have not personally used, but I believe a lot of the code in this library was written by at least two Google employees currently working on Compose.. so there may be some good knowledge to be gained here: https://github.com/halilozercan/compose-richtext

[Norbi]

I ported a Jetpack compose library someone made to multiplatform compose

Nice, thanks 🙂

One question: the original library's authors are not interested in multiplatform?

[Casey Brooks]

I’ve been looking for something like this, great job! Definitely early, but a very promising start.

Are there plans to support saving/loading text, such as to/from HTML strings? And having a built-in toolbar with keyboard shortcuts would just be 🤌

[Adam Brown]

Yup, I opened an issue on his repo and was told he was done working on it but I was welcome to fork it

[Adam Brown]

That's all pretty possible, I'm not sure if it should be included in this library? But maybe. In the project I'm using this library in I have it exporting to mark down already.

[Casey Brooks]

Maybe it could have several Gradle modules with some of these extra features, so that the core artifact doesn’t get too bloated? I would suggest keeping the core data classes and the RichTextField in a core artifact, and moving the RichTextEditor into a separate one with an additional RichTextToolbar component. And then more artifacts for exporting to HTML, Markdown, etc. would also be very valuable.

I would love to collaborate on some of this. I’ve been able to throw together a basic toolbar POC that I’d happily contribute and help maintain

[Adam Brown]

ya that'd work pretty well, currently the desktop & android demos have a toolbar that covers a lot of this functionality. Would love to collaborate too, this is really at a POC state at the moment, there's a lot of work to be done in the future to make it more production ready.

[Adam Brown]

The main issue at the moment is that BasicTextField which this uses under the hood, is not setup to deal with rich text as it get's changes. So RichTextEditor does a lot of book keeping and full data copies in order to maintain the state around the rich text spans. It's really inefficient and will certainly become a problem with large amounts of text.