Scribe - A true WYSIWYG editor (Built using AI)

ernestdefoe · 2026-09-01T19:33:31+00:00

[Free] Scribe — a true WYSIWYG editor, with no Markdown anywhere in the stack I've just released Scribe, a WYSIWYG editor for Flarum 2 built on TipTap. The part that makes it different: you can uninstall flarum/markdown and fof/rich-text entirely, and your existing posts keep rendering exactly as they did — no migration, no rewritten rows. GitHubernestdefoe/scribe Packagisthttps://packagist.org/packages/ernestdefoe/scribe Supporthttps://ernestdefoe.online/t/scribe LicenceMIT — free RequiresFlarum 2.0, PHP 8.2+ Why another editor Every WYSIWYG editor for Flarum so far has been a rich editor sitting on top of Markdown. The document is serialised to Markdown when you submit, and parsed back from Markdown when you edit. That is why flarum/markdown is a hard dependency of fof/rich-text. It also explains the thing people actually complain about: Markdown keeps leaking into an editor that is supposed to be what-you-see-is-what-you-get. You type **bold** and it turns bold. You paste code with underscores and half of it goes italic. Scribe removes the Markdown layer instead of hiding it. TipTap already speaks HTML natively, so taking Markdown out makes the pipeline simpler, not harder. Type **asterisks** in Scribe and they stay exactly as typed, because nothing downstream is looking for them. "But won't that destroy all my old posts?" This was the first thing I checked, and the answer is no — but only because Scribe does something specific about it. Flarum doesn't store posts as source text. It stores them as s9e TextFormatter XML, and the tag vocabulary in that XML — STRONG, EM, H2, LIST, LI, C — belongs to s9e, not to Markdown. Markdown was only ever one parser feeding those tags. So Scribe emits the same vocabulary from HTML, and ships templates for the tags flarum/markdown used to own. A post written three years ago in Markdown and a post written today in Scribe are the same shape in the database and go through one render path. Worth being blunt about the alternative: if you uninstall flarum/markdown on a forum without something doing this, every post you have quietly flattens. The text survives; every heading, bold, list and code span does not. There's no error — it just renders as plain text from then on. That failure is the reason this extension has the design it has. If you run flarum/bbcode, it keeps ownership of the tags it already provides (CODE, QUOTE, URL, IMG, LIST, LI, DEL, EMAIL), so syntax highlighting on code blocks and quote citation carry on untouched. Things Markdown could never do Because posts no longer have to be expressible in Markdown: Tables. s9e's Litedown has no table syntax at all — on a Markdown forum a pasted table renders as a paragraph full of pipes. Scribe gives you real tables. Text colour, underline, and highlight. Build your own toolbar Every feature is a chip you drag into the toolbar, in whatever order you want it. Drag it back out to remove it. Keyboard users get the same control: Enter adds a feature, arrow keys move it, Delete removes it. Performance This was the other thing I wanted to get right, because "the rich editor made my forum slow" is a fair complaint about editors of this kind. TipTap and ProseMirror come to roughly 430KB. Bundled into forum.js, that is downloaded, parsed and executed by every visitor on every page view — including guests who can't post at all. Scribe loads the editor as a separate chunk, the first time a composer actually opens: AssetSizeWhen it loads forum.js10 KiBevery page editor chunk431 KiBfirst time a composer opens The toolbar also re-renders only when the set of active buttons genuinely changes, rather than on every keystroke. Works with what you already run Mentions — unchanged. @name autocomplete and rendering are untouched. Quoting a post — flarum/mentions inserts Markdown through the editor interface; Scribe turns it into a real blockquote. FoF Upload — inserts ![alt](url); Scribe turns it into a real image node. Those last two matter more than they look: other extensions have every reason to keep speaking Markdown through Flarum's editor driver, because that has always been the contract. Scribe translates just those constructs on the way in, so it doesn't quietly break the extensions around it. Install composer require ernestdefoe/scribe php flarum cache:clear if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Then disable flarum/markdown and remove fof/rich-text. Links Source: ernestdefoe/scribe Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/ernestdefoe/scribe Support and bug reports: https://ernestdefoe.online/t/scribe Licence: MIT Bug reports and feature requests are welcome, either on the support forum or on GitHub. If you find a post that renders differently after you drop Markdown, I want to know about it — that's the case the whole design exists to handle.

ernestdefoe

Forogramero Good glad it's actually working for you.

Forogramero

ernestdefoe It feels ultra-fast! 😀

ernestdefoe

Forogramero I'm glad you feel like that as when I had Claude build it I told it that it needed to be optimized so it's fast and works as it should without slowing people's sites down. That was one complaint about the old Rich Text editor was people complaining about how slow it made their sites but they accepted it because they didn't like Markdown.

Forogramero

ernestdefoe I'm having an issue with the Scriber text editor on the mobile version. The editing box where the user types their text is too narrow—in fact, it's so cut off that it's almost as if it doesn't exist. Additionally, I'm getting several errors in the console, with the main one being: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'length') at counter.ts:58. This error seems to be causing a cascade of other issues. Please take a look.

I disabled the extension, and everything went to normal

ernestdefoe

Will look into this ASAP.

ClaudiusH

Forogramero That console error of yours stems from the Magic Read extension trying to count the length of the message being created in composer. That extension is currently not compatible with Scribe. Disabling it does away with those errors

ernestdefoe

ClaudiusH thanks for that now I know what to look at. Working on making them play nice with each other.

Forogramero

ClaudiusH Oh, I understand now... Thank you. In the meantime, I'll be waiting for the update...

ernestdefoe

Forogramero

This is fixed in Scribe 1.0.2 — thank you for the console trace, that's what identified it.

The cause was on my side. Flarum's built-in editor exposes a <textarea>, and other extensions read .value off it and listen for input events. Scribe replaces that with a rich-text element, so anything relying on the old shape got undefined — MagicRead's character counter was calling .value.length on every keystroke, which is where your counter.ts:58 errors came from. Because those listeners weren't isolated, that one error also stopped the toolbar updating and cascaded into the editor itself, which is why it looked so broken.

Scribe now keeps that contract, and misbehaving listeners can't take the editor down. composer update ernestdefoe/scribe and clear the cache. Please let me know if anything still looks off on mobile.

Forogramero

ernestdefoe :

The console errors have been fixed. Nevertheless, the input field where users compose their text remains excessively narrow—to the point of being nearly invisible.
Perhaps we should add a resizable textarea with a draggable corner grip, allowing users to adjust the box height and width as needed."

ernestdefoe

Forogramero will get this fixed ASAP.

ernestdefoe

Forogramero is this on mobile or what? That box looks very narrow to be on desktop as it doesn't look like for me on Safari.

Forogramero

ernestdefoe It's in its mobile version. I have used two browsers to checked it out: Firefox and Brave. In both of them, input field where users compose their text remains excessively narrow, as you can in the past image...

Forogramero

ernestdefoe Additionally, you have to make it compatible with the "Social Groups" extension, because currently, when you remove the Markdown and Rich Editor extensions, the text that is entered and attempted to be formatted with Markdown does not work.

ernestdefoe

Forogramero will add that to the list. Heck didn't even think about testing it out against one of my own extensions.

Forogramero

@ernestdefoe

In this case with Social Groups, you have to think it through carefully, because if you modify the Social Groups extension to work with your Scribe extension instead of Rich Text and Markdown, people will have to decide to abandon Rich Text and Markdown in order to use Social Groups. By then, and in order to make this change, I think Scribe should be 100% polished.

Tough decision for many. In the meantime, I have to go back to Rich Editor and Markdown because Social Groups its more important for me.

ernestdefoe

Forogramero new update should be out and on Social Groups if you are using this extension it will use it and if not it will use Markdown or Rich Text depending on which you are using. Update for it is out too.

ernestdefoe

Forogramero I really hope this new update fixes all the issues you have been having but if not I will keep going till it's fixed.