WYSIWYG editing for SwiftUI and UIKit apps.
Jealous of those JavaScript coders with their WYSIWYG text editors, but just can't stomach the idea of immersing yourself in JavaScript when you're enjoying the comfort and joy of Swift? Yeah, me too. So when I was forced to do it, I thought I'd share what I did as a way to help others avoid it.
I am working on a larger project that requires embedded support for "rich text" editing. WYSIWYG editing is a must-have requirement for me. I could have forced my developer-users to use Markdown, but I find it to be annoying both to write and to look at while writing. Who wants to have to mentally filter all that cruft on the screen? Sure, it's a lot better than editing raw HTML; but come on, this is the 21st century. Having to deal with an editing experience where you use some kind of "preview mode" to make sure that what you are writing will be presented like you expect feels like CI/CD for writing.
Still, I wanted an editing experience that didn't get in the way. I wanted something with the feature-simplicity of Markdown, but presented in a clean, what-you-see-is-what-you-get manner that supported the basics people expect:
- Styling
- Present a paragraph or header with a predefined font size
- Bulleted and numbered lists
- Indenting and outdenting of text
- Formatting
- Bold, italic, underline, code, strikethrough, sub- and super-scripting
- Embedding
- Images
- Tables
- Links
As you might expect, then, this feature set is pretty darned close to Markdown - or at least a GitHub flavor of Markdown. And as soon as you do WYSIWYG editing, you must support undo/redo properly. The feature list doesn't include some things you might expect from your favorite word processor:
- Colored text
- Highlighting
- Font size changes (except as implied by identifying something as a paragraph or header)
The initial open source release does not support the following (but I plan to):
- Text alignment (although how well this translates back-and-forth to Markdown remains to be seen)
- Flexible table formatting
- Copy/paste preserving formatting (currently only supports plain text)
If you want a richer feature set, you can extend the MarkupEditor yourself. The demos include examples of how to extend the MarkupEditor's core features and how to interact with the file system for saving what you edit. It's my intent to keep the core MarkupEditor feature set to be similar to what you will see in GitHub Markdown.
The MarkupEditor is presenting an HTML document to you as you edit. It uses JavaScript to change the underlying DOM and calls back into Swift as you interact with the document. The MarkupEditor does not know how to save your document or transform it to some other format. This is something your application that consumes the MarkupEditor will need to do. The MarkupEditor will let your MarkupDelegate know as the underlying document changes state, and you can take advantage of those notifications to save and potentially transform the HTML into another form. If you're going to do that, then you should make sure that round-tripping back into HTML also works flawlessly. Otherwise, you are using a "What You See Is Not What You Get" editor, which is both less pronounceable and much less useful to your end users.
Behind the scenes, the MarkupEditor interacts with an HTML document (created in markup.html) that uses a single contentEditable DIV element to modify the DOM of the document you are editing. It uses a subclass of WKWebView - the MarkupWKWebView - to make calls to the JavaScript in markup.js. In turn, the JavaScript calls back into Swift to let the Swift side know that changes occurred. The callbacks on the Swift side are handled by the MarkupCoordinator. The MarkupCoordinator is the WKScriptMessageHandler for a single MarkupWKWebView and receives all the JavaScript callbacks in userContentController(_:didReceive:). The MarkupCoordinator in turn notifies your MarkupDelegate of changes. See MarkupDelegate.swift for the full protocol and default implementations.
That sounds complicated, but it is mostly implementation details you should not need to worry about. The MarkupDelegate protocol is the key mechanism for your app to find out about changes as the user interacts with the document. The MarkupWKWebView is the key mechanism to make changes to the document from the Swift side or to obtain information from the document, such as its contents. The MarkupToolbar is a convenient, pre-built UI to invoke changes to the document by interacting with the MarkupWKWebView.
To avoid spurious logging from the underlying WKWebView in the Xcode console, you can set OS_ACTIVITY_MODE to disable in the Run properties for your target.
NOTE: The MarkupEditor at this point has only really been used as a Mac Catalyst app and has some implicit dependencies on using it with a keyboard.
Add the MarkupEditor package to your Xcode project using File -> Swift Packages -> Add Package Dependency...
Clone this repository and build the MarkupFramework target in Xcode. Add the MarkupEditor.framework as a dependency to your project.
When consuming the MarkupEditor in SwiftUI, you can use the MarkupToolbar and MarkupWebView directly in your own View. The MarkupWebView is a UIViewRepresentable for the MarkupWKWebView and deals with setting up the MarkupCoordinator itself.
In the simplest case, just add the MarkupToolbar and a MarkupWebView to your ContentView. The selectionState and selectedWebView have to be accessed by both the MarkupToolbar and MarkupWebView, so can be held as state in ContentView. By setting your ContentView as the markupDelegate, it will receive the markupDidLoad callback when a MarkupWKWebView has loaded its content along with the JavaScript held in markup.js. (If you have multiple MarkupWebViews and a single MarkupToolbar, you can use the markupTookFocus callback to tell the MarkupToolbar which view it should operate on.) The example below shows how to use the markupDidLoad callback to assign the selectedWebView so that the MarkupToolbar correctly reflects the selectionState as the user edits and positions the caret in the document.
import SwiftUI
import MarkupEditor
struct ContentView: View {
@StateObject var selectionState = SelectionState()
@State var selectedWebView: MarkupWKWebView?
var body: some View {
VStack {
MarkupToolbar(
selectionState: selectionState,
selectedWebView: $selectedWebView,
markupDelegate: self
)
MarkupWebView(
selectionState: selectionState,
selectedWebView: $selectedWebView,
markupDelegate: self,
initialContent: "<h1>Hello world!</h1>"
)
}
}
}
extension ContentView: MarkupDelegate {
func markupDidLoad(_ view: MarkupWKWebView, handler: (()->Void)?) {
selectedWebView = view
}
}
The MarkupToolbar is a SwiftUI View, so consuming it in UIKit is a bit more complicated than in SwiftUI. You also need to create and hook up the MarkupCoordinator yourself, something that is done by the SwiftUI MarkupWebView. Please refer to the UIKitDemo code for a detailed example. I'd like there to be less boilerplate code, but I'm also planning on using the MarkupEditor in a SwiftUI app so am likely not to put a lot of effort into that.
If you consume just the package, you don't get the demo targets to build. If you create a workspace that contains the MarkupEditor project or just clone this repository, you will also get the two demo targets, creatively named SwiftUIDemo and UIKitDemo. There is also a MarkupEditor framework target in the project that is 100% the equivalent of the Swift package. By default, the demos both consume the framework, because I find it to be a lot less hassle when developing the project overall, especially in the early stage. The only difference between consuming the framework and the Swift package is how the MarkupWKWebView locates and loads its markup.html resource when it is instantiated.
The demos open demo.html, which contains information about how to use the MarkupEditor as an end user and shows you the capabilities.
The current version is very much a work in progress. The work is a back-and-forth between the MarkupEditor package proper and the two demos. I am now consuming it in another project I am developing, so changes here are going to be driven primarily by MarkupEditor uptake in that project (and any issues people might raise).
The labeled toolbar took up too much screen real estate in my other project, so I created a .compact form and made that selectable via ToolbarPreference. Now I have a way to add other preferences easily. I also needed a better way to communicate the selectionState and selectedWebView when I have an arbitrary number of MarkupWebViews being editing using a single MarkupToolbar. I set up MarkupEnv to accomplish that and adjusted the SwiftUIDemo and UIKitDemo to use it.
- Add this History section to the README.
- Make the toolbar configurable between .compact (the new default) and .labeled via ToolbarPreference.
- Use MarkupEnv to access the selectionState and selectedWebView.
- Bundle loading logic now depends on SWIFT_PACKAGE in MarkupWKWebView, not my homegrown USEFRAMEWORK setting.
- Some minor adjustments to backgrounds and css to fix issues when the MarkupToolbar and MarkupWebView were embedded in other SwiftUI views.
- This was the first version made public and open sourced.
- At this point, the MarkupEditor is really only useful on devices with a keyboard. On the iPad (and worse on the iPhone), the toolbar is too wide, and it isn't set up for scrolling or, better, for a different display for the format. I intend to work on the iPad usage but have not put any time into it. I am primarily focused on using it on the Mac.
- Caret occasionally goes missing. After some editing operations, the insertion point caret is properly placed but disappears. Moving the arrow keys or typing will reveal it.
- Table editing
- Table styling is hardcoded. I plan to provide options for putting borders around elements, header, etc.
- Headers are currently colspanning the full table, but this needs to be adjustable.
- Tab (⇥) navigates forward in the table, but ⇧⇥ doesn't work properly. You can use ⌘= as a hack to navigate back for now.
- Image editing
- Selection is funky. Should show the image itself being selected but does not.
- Scaling is clunky. I plan to replace the Stepper with an overlay with handles on the image.
- Save and cancel should go away in favor of immediate preview and undo.
- List editing
- Tab (⇥) indents list items, but ⇧⇥; doesn't work. You can use ⌘] to indent and ⌘[ to outdent.
- Needs to support text justification. Initially I thought I could live without it, since it's not properly supported in Markdown. But, especially with tables, it is really a must-have.
- Preferences. I need to preference all the things.
- Menus are not done properly.
When I started my search for an open source "Swift WYSIWYG editor", I found a kind of mishmash of things. The RichEditorView was one of the most visible. The RichEditorView was originally built using UIWebView, which has long been deprecated. A couple of people forked and ported it to WKWebView and shared their work. I used that for a while in some work I was doing, but I kept hitting edges and felt like I was having to put a lot of work into a fork that would never really see the light of day. The thought of moving the result into SwiftUI was making me queasy. The MarkupEditor is meant to be a proper "modern" version for WYSIWYG editing you can use in your SwiftUI or UIKit project, but it was hatched in the original RichEditorView.
The MarkupEditor's approach of using an HTML document containing a contentEditable DIV under the covers seems like a good idea until you read Nick Santos' article about Why ContentEditable is Terrible. His main arguments center around WYSIWYG, and the meaning of the term when editing a document in this way. In the simplest case, consider if you save the HTML you edited using the MarkupEditor and then use a different CSS to display it in a different browser. What you saw when you edited will certainly not be what you get. The text content will be 100% the same, of course. If what you are editing and saving remains in the same HTML form and is presented using the same CSS using a WKWebView, then it will be WYSIWYG. In any case, you need to think about it when adopting this approach.
The MarkupEditor has the advantage of not supporting arbitrary HTML, and in fact, owns the definition of the exact subset of HTML that is allowed. It is targeted only at WKWebView, so there are no browser portability problems. The restrictions on functionality and the absence of styling elements from the HTML help avoid some of the problems cited in his article. Also, by avoiding use of (the now deprecated but likely to live forever) Document.execCommand to perform editing tasks against the DOM, the MarkupEditor avoids WebKit polluting the "clean" HTML with spans and styles.
In case you think "To heck with this contentEditable nonsense. How hard can it be to build a little editor!?", I refer you to this article on lord.io. I did not enjoy writing JavaScript while implementing this project, but the DOM and its incredibly well-documented API are proven and kind of amazing. To be able to ride on top of the work done in the browser is a gift horse that should not be looked in the mouth.