What is the easiest-to-use web "rich text editor"

Question

I am looking for a text editor to be used in a web page. Where users can format the text and get a WYSIWYG experience. Doesn't need to be too fancy. But has to be easy to use and integrate into the page. Has to generate HTML as output. Support AJAX (one I checked works only with standard form submit) and has to be small in terms of download to the user's browser.

Answer 1

Try FCKeditor. It supports integration with most popular platforms, and it's fairly lightweight.

Answer 2

Another vote for FCKeditor. It is great.

Answer 3

Well it depends what platform you are on if you are looking for server-side functionality as well, but the defacto badass WYSIWYg in my opinion is FCKeditor. I have worked with this personally in numerous environments (both professional and hobby level) and have always been impressed.

It's certainly worth a look. I believe it is employed by open source projects such as SubText as well. Perhaps, Jon Galloway can add to this if he reads this question. Or Phil if he is currently a user.

Answer 4

TinyMCE is the simplest I've found to use. I've never used it in an AJAX-enabled application, but there are instructions on how to do so on the project's wiki.

Answer 5

You might also want to look at YUI's Rich Text Editor.

If you're starting your site from scratch or haven't invested a lot of effort into another JavaScript platform, Yahoo User Interface (YUI) is a very complete JavaScript library that could help you add other AJAX elements beyond a text editor.

Answer 6

I just did a full day of evaluation of all the ones mentioned so far (and then some), and the one I liked the best is Obout Editor. I think it might be for ASP.NET only, so it might not work for you, but if you are using .NET, it's great. The HTML output is clean and nicely styled, and the rendered output looks the same in the editor as it does when you output it to the page (something I had trouble with when using the others due to doctype settings in the editor). It costs a few bucks, but it was worth it for us.

Answer 7

I found TinyMCE pretty easy to implement. And it's light on bandwidth usage too.

Answer 8

Using fck for some tine now, after "free text box", or something like that. Had problems only once, when I put fck inside asp.net ajax updatepanel, but found fix on forums. Problem was solved in next release.
I would like to see some nice photo browser in it, because fck comes only with simple browser that displays filename, no thumbs. The other one, that has thumbs costs bunch of money.
Didn't try it with asp.net mvc, don't know how will uploading work. It uses one ascx for wrapping js functionality.

Answer 9

i started out using free text box when i was doing a lot of asp.net programming, but now that most of what i do is php i've moved to the FCK editor.

while the change wasn't necessarily prompted by the language, i feel that the fck editor is a better choice because of it's versatility.

Answer 10

For something minimalist, take a look at Widg Editor, it's truly tiny and very simple. It's only haphazardly supported as a hobby project though.

I'm currently using the RTE component of DynarchLib, which is highly customisable - definitely does AJAX - but a bit complicated and not very pretty. It is actively supported, and you can get answers on their forum very quickly.

I previously tried Dojo's editor, and found it broken and badly undocumented. YMMV.

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Edit: In response to other people's answers, I've now tried TinyMCE and found it to be excellent. More easily configurable and far fewer problems than anything else I've tried. Use TinyMCE!