Rich text editors are essential components of many modern web applications, providing users with powerful tools to compose and format content. Tiptap, a headless editor framework built on top of ProseMirror, is a popular choice among developers who need a flexible and extensible rich text editor in their Vue applications. In this blog post, I’ll guide you through setting up a Tiptap editor using Vue 3 and Vite.

What is Tiptap?

Tiptap is a headless, framework-agnostic editor framework that allows you to build rich text editors using a modular architecture. It’s built on top of the robust ProseMirror library, which provides the foundational editing capabilities. Tiptap extends this with a suite of extensions and a Vue-friendly interface, making it a prime choice for developers looking to integrate advanced text editing features into their applications.

Why Use Tiptap with Vue and Vite?

Integrating Tiptap with Vue 3 and Vite offers several benefits:

• Ease of Use: Tiptap’s API is straightforward, making it easy to add complex text editing features to your Vue apps.
• Customizability: With Tiptap’s modular architecture, you can easily enable or disable features as needed.
• Performance: Vite provides a fast development environment, ensuring that your project with Tiptap remains efficient and responsive.
• Collaboration Ready: Tiptap supports real-time collaboration out of the box with extensions for Yjs, a framework for real-time collaborative editing.

Prerequisites

Before diving into the setup, ensure you have the following installed on your development machine:

• Node.js (v18.x)
• npm (v8.x) or Yarn (v1.x)

This guide will use Yarn in the examples, but you can use npm if you prefer.

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Setting Up Your Project

Note: This tutorial will walk you through initializing your own project. However, feel free to check out my project files for an even quicker start.

Step 1: Initialize Your Project

First, let’s create a new directory for our project and navigate into it:

mkdir tiptap-vue-playground
cd tiptap-vue-playground

Next, initialize a new Vite + Vue project:

npm create vite@latest
# or
yarn create vite

Follow the prompts to set up a Vue project. When asked for the project name and framework, you can choose Vue and name the project as you like.

Step 2: Install Dependencies

To use Tiptap in our project, we need to install a few packages. Run the following command to install the necessary Tiptap and Yjs packages:

yarn add @tiptap/starter-kit @tiptap/vue-3 y-prosemirror y-webrtc yjs
# or
npm install @tiptap/starter-kit @tiptap/vue-3 y-prosemirror y-webrtc yjs

Step 3: Set Up the Tiptap Editor

Now, let’s set up the Tiptap editor in a Vue component. Create a new file src/components/Editor.vue and add the following code:

<script setup lang="ts">
import * as Y from "yjs"
import {EditorContent, useEditor} from "@tiptap/vue-3"
import StarterKit from "@tiptap/starter-kit"

const editor = useEditor({
  content: `
    <h2>
      Hello World!
    </h2>
  `,
  extensions: [
    StarterKit,
  ],
})

</script>

<template>
  <EditorContent :editor="editor" />
</template>

This code sets up a basic Tiptap editor with the default starter kit, which includes basic text formatting options like bold, italic, and underline.

Step 4: Integrate the Editor Component

To see the Tiptap editor in action, integrate it into your main application component. Open src/App.vue and modify it as follows:

<template>
  <header>

    <div class="wrapper">
      <HelloWorld msg="You did it!" />
    </div>
  </header>

  <main>
    <Editor />
  </main>
</template>

Step 5: Run Your Project

Finally, start the Vite development server to see your Tiptap editor in action:

yarn dev
# or
npm run dev

Navigate to http://localhost:5173 in your web browser, and you should see your Tiptap editor ready and waiting!

Next Steps

Now that you have a basic Tiptap editor set up, here are some suggestions for further exploration:

• Customize the Editor: Explore more Tiptap extensions to add features like headings, lists, links, and even custom extensions.
• Enable Collaboration: Implement collaborative editing by integrating y-prosemirror, y-webrtc, and yjs.
• Optimize for Production: Use Vite’s build commands to compile and optimize your application for production deployment.