Show HN: Your online WYSIWYG editor is broken

Online WYSIWYG editors have frustrated us for a long time. We were fed up so we decided to scratch our own itch and build one from the bottom up. We talked to over two dozen developers to weed out the top problems and then implemented a solution. The result is SnapEditor.<p>We’re still in beta but we believe we’re stable enough to release a version out into the wild. It’s better to release early and be embarrassed right? Please let us know what you think.

- Can't actually provide link text (&#60;a href="#"&#62;link text&#60;/a&#62;).<p>- Can't insert images, videos, flash, etc.<p>- No way to set custom styling, change font size, change font itself, change the font itself.<p>- Tab doesn't insert tab, but rather removes the highlight.<p>- No justification.<p>Compared to other offerings on the market (my main comparison being TinyMCE), this simply offers a quick way to make very simple edits without necessitating the clicking of "save". This sounds like somewhat of a niche market.

This looks pretty impressive. I think the cost is too much, even if it is a one-time cost.<p>Do you have any paying customers yet?

Nice work! I think there is still more work to be done in the WYSIWYG world as all the current editors I've tried in my app seem to either be frustrating to use or too bloated (I love speedy scripts)<p>I have 2 suggestions:<p>1. Could you please release a version without jQuery baked into it, I really don't like it when plugins include jQuery in their source as it's a lot of unnecessary bloat added to the application (and most people have jQuery on their site already or can include it easy enough if they don't).<p>2. I'd love it if you could make each feature (additional options / controls etc) on top of this core an additional module and make sure they don't rely on each other like how jQuery-UI does it. I haven't found a single WYSIWYG editor that does this and it frustrates me because I have a need for an editor with some functionality and not others and would like the ability to not include unnecessary features to reduce file size and improve performance.<p>Then you could release a full version with every single feature baked in, or a minimal version which is just the core and you can add in other features by including the js files for the features you want and enabling them via a config file.<p>If you build the API well enough and snapeditor is popular enough you could even enlist the community help to build plugins for it for features they'd like to see, sublime text does this really well.

I have to say, that's one of the best designed little sites I've seen. Clear answers to all my questions up front, slick, good value proposition and explanation. Great job!

So I'm sitting here browsing HN with my iPad, as I often do in the morning. I click on one of the editable areas. Controls pop up, the rest of the screen dims, cool.<p>But how do I leave editing mode? I am betting hitting ESC would do it - but tablet and phone keyboards don't have that key.

Definitely looks fantastic (assuming, of course, everything works as roadmapped).<p>Gotta say that the price is a bit of a turnoff (can't see paying double my yearly server cost for a text editor...), but I know you guys need to make money, so I can only say, "best of luck!"<p>I think you'd see a lot more traction with a much lower itch point (I'd pay $99 for the unlimited license, for instance). And what's with the users and developers thing? I'm not even sure how you'd track it, assuming it's a non-hosted script, and even then I can't see a justification for jacking the price up. Again, I know you need to make money, but c'mon....<p>Just my thoughts. The product itself looks fantastic. Just hope I can afford it....

I have no problem paying for good software. The cost seems in the ballpark if it had all the features I need.<p>I would want the ability to add different classes other than just h1, h2.<p>Most of my projects will be using twitter bootstrap or jquery UI so it has to integrate well.<p>The link popup does not have the ability to add a target. For UGC, I would like the ability to force a target and add google analytics code.

Not for nothing, but if you converted your text editor into a commenting system or wiki type product for site visitors on certain pages it would make for a beautiful commenting system, but that would essentially force everyone to pay $299.<p>If I was you I might consider a wordpress plugin for $50 to replace the visual editor. A lot of non-technical people on wordpress would appreciate something cleaner.

I'm currently using <a href="http://aloha-editor.org/" rel="nofollow">http://aloha-editor.org/</a> and would consider moving to this one but it doesn't provide anything on top of what aloha does except it costs money and aloha doesn't.<p>I will checkout the Charitable license but would prefer something open source so I could give back :)

Can it be hosted on a subdomain? Say your app is on example.com but the SnapEditor CSS and JS are on static.example.com?<p>I wasted an immense amount of time trying to get TinyMCE working properly on a subdomain, so don't care to repeat the experience.

This looks really good and could see us using this, but the image upload front-end is essential for our needs.<p>Do you have an ETA on when you are going to be releasing the image upload front-end function?

Wow, great job guys!! Looks fantastic and feels very impressive. Very slick.

Most editors drive me crazy. Especially when the bullets get all messed up. SnapEditor looks great.<p>Why limit the licenses by developer though? By domain makes more sense to me.

Yes, it seems to be, the request is timing out. The one you posted, that is.<p>Best of luck with fixing it, though.<p>Edit: it finally seems to load, but <i>slowly</i>.

Erase everything from the inline editor and tap the backspace key, broken in latest Chrome on Windows.

I wish I had this 5 - 6 months ago when I started working on Blueprint. Would have been awesome

This seems pretty great. How difficult would it be to integrate into Mediawiki?

Guys, congratz, this is one of the rare gems on it's way to become a classic.

your online WYSIWYG editor is broken too. Literally. It crashes my Chrome.

Nice job guys! This is amazing!

Good start, congratulations!