Gem

Performant and lightweight rich text editor.

Gem is a performant and lightweight rich text editor, written with Prosemirror. The design is inspired by Paco Coursey's writer.

Design goals

Gem's goals are to be approachable, simple, and playful. It's different from other rich text editors in that its more like a syntax highlighter. This was intentional; I think it gives users more agency to keep everything keyboard-first. Normally in a rich text editor, you can write *bold* (or similar) to convert it into a bold token. That's nice if its what you intended, but it makes it annoying to change it back to a regular word, and if you happen to press backspace, now you're "stuck" in a bold context until you press cmd-b or toggle bold some other way.

I got annoyed by this, so Gem takes a different approach. Syntax highlighting means pressing backspace and deleting the second * will remove the bold mark.

Future plans

I'm actively working on Gem currently. My website has its own blog post format .tk, which is based on markdown. I'm working on changing Gem's parser to use my blog post parser instead.