Show HN: Tiptap UI Components – Free React Components for Building Editor UIs

Show HN: Tiptap UI Components – Free React Components for Building Editor UIs(github.com)

20 points by philipisik 1 year ago | 6 comments

Hi, Philip here from Tiptap. We just released a new set of open source UI components for Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/), our headless text editor framework.

These are handcrafted React components that integrate directly with Tiptap’s headless core, things like toolbars, dropdowns, formatting buttons, upload controls, etc. They’re MIT licensed and fully optional. You can use them as-is or customize every part.

There’s also a CLI that sets everything up for you: project scaffolding, recommended defaults, and a working example.

This is for folks who like the flexibility of Tiptap but don’t want to start from zero every time they need an editor UI. It doesn’t change how Tiptap works – just gives you a faster way to build on top of it.

Live demo: https://template.tiptap.dev/simple

Docs: https://tiptap.dev/docs/ui-components/getting-started/overvi...

GitHub: https://github.com/ueberdosis/tiptap-ui-components

CLI: npx @tiptap/cli init

We’re working on more components (e.g. comments, version history) including some tied to Tiptap Cloud. The ones released now are 100% free and open source.

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who’s built editor UIs before. What should we add next?

alir8zana 1 year ago |

Thank you for these new UI components! The library looks impressive. The MIT license and optional nature of these components are definitely steps in the right direction. Though I wanted to share some thoughts on the business model. The subscription-based approach for core editor functionality presents challenges when competing with fully open source alternatives. The product quality and developer experience with Tiptap are truly excellent, but having an editor as a subscription service can be difficult to justify for many projects. I think the cloud services make perfect sense as premium offerings, but it would be worth considering a different approach for the base editor experience. Perhaps offering a premium one-time purchase option for entrepreneurs could bridge the gap. A feature rich premium template without requiring deep knowledge of ProseMirror/Tiptap internals would definitely be something interesting. For future components, I'd love to see commenting threads with Hocuspocus live notifications. Also, an AI toolbar similar to Notion's implementation would be valuable. The TipTap template is different from the notion UX. The content edits in the notion implementation happen in a separate AI-specific editor and users can suggest changes there, rather than in the main editor. Again, thanks for the continuous improvements to Tiptap.

philipisik 1 year ago | |

Really thoughtful comment! Thanks for taking the time.

Yeah, figuring out the right business model around open source is always a balancing act. And it’s never done. We started Tiptap by monetizing some of the more complex editor extensions, but with the launch of cloud services, we’ve gradually shifted that line to “cloud vs non-cloud,” like you said. Still, that line keeps moving as the ecosystem grows.

Your point about one-time payments for solo developers or indie founders makes a lot of sense. Honestly, we've been actively thinking about such an offering for quite a while and how to make Tiptap more accessible without giving up on sustainability.

yodon 1 year ago |

There's an image on the second link you provided (the getting started overview page) that I think has a picture of all the components, but the image loads at very low resolution on mobile and if I click to expand it the click takes me to another page that doesn't have the image.

Would be great to be able to actually see all these components.

philipisik 1 year ago | |

Hi, thanks for letting us know. Will check the image size. You can find an overview of all components in our docs :-) https://tiptap.dev/docs/ui-components/components/overview

daniel_sushil 1 year ago |

Do you have components for Vue?

philipisik 1 year ago | |

Not yet. It's a lot of work to maintain more frameworks, docs and support.