📝 react-mde

A simple yet powerful and extensible React Markdown Editor. React-mde has no 3rd party dependencies.

Demo

• Demo
• Demo on CodeSandbox

Goal

The goal is to make react-mde to look and behave like the Github's Markdown editor. These are the major remaining features/changes. I plan to tackle them in orde but if you want to help, that would be amazing.

• Design improvements (under development)
• Image upload support

Installing

npm i react-mde

Markdown Preview

React-mde is agnostic regarding how to preview Markdown. The examples will use Showdown

npm install showdown

from version 7.4, it is also possible to return a Promise to React Element from generateMarkdownPreview, which makes it possible to use ReactMarkdown as a preview. View issue.

Using

React-mde is a completely controlled component.

Minimal example using Showdown. View live on CodeSandBox:

import * as React from "react";
import ReactMde from "react-mde";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import * as Showdown from "showdown";
import "react-mde/lib/styles/css/react-mde-all.css";

const converter = new Showdown.Converter({
  tables: true,
  simplifiedAutoLink: true,
  strikethrough: true,
  tasklists: true
});

export default function App() {
  const [value, setValue] = React.useState("**Hello world!!!**");
  const [selectedTab, setSelectedTab] = React.useState<"write" | "preview">("write");
  return (
    <div className="container">
      <ReactMde
        value={value}
        onChange={setValue}
        selectedTab={selectedTab}
        onTabChange={setSelectedTab}
        generateMarkdownPreview={markdown =>
          Promise.resolve(converter.makeHtml(markdown))
        }
      />
    </div>
  );
}

Customizing Icons

React-mde comes with SVG icons extracted from FontAwesome included.

You can customize the way icons are resolved by passing your own getIcon that will return a ReactNode given a command name.

<ReactMde
    getIcon={(commandName) => <MyCustomIcon name={commandName} />}
    onChange={this.handleValueChange}
    // ...
/>

React-mde Props

The types are described below

• value: string: The Markdown value.
• onChange: (value: string): Event handler for the onChange event.
• selectedTab: "write" | "preview": The currently selected tab.
• onTabChange: (tab) => void: Function called when the selected tab changes.
• classes?: An object containing the following optional properties: reactMde, toolbar, preview, textArea, grip and suggestionsDropdown. This allows for passing class names to each of the inner components of React-mde. Classes defined in the classes prop follow the specification of Jed Watson's classNames project.
• className?: string: OBSOLETE - Optional class name to be added to the top level element. Use the classes prop instead.
• commands?: CommandGroup[]: An array of CommandGroup, which, each one, contain a commands property (array of Command). If no commands are specified, the default will be used. Commands are explained in more details below.
• generateMarkdownPreview: (markdown: string) => Promise<string | ReactElement>;: Function that should return a Promise to the generated HTML or a React element for the preview. If this prop is falsy, then no preview is going to be generated.
• getIcon?: (commandName: string) => React.ReactNode } An optional set of button content options, including an iconProvider to allow custom icon rendering. options. It is recommended to inspect the layouts source code to see what options can be passed to each while the documentation is not complete.
• loadingPreview: What to display in the preview while it is loading. Value can be string, React Element or anything React can render.
• emptyPreviewHtml (deprecated): What to display in the preview while it is loading. Deprecated in favor of loadingPreview
• readOnly?: boolean: Flag to render the editor in read-only mode.
• textAreaProps: Extra props to be passed to the textarea component.
• l18n: A localization option. It contains the strings write and preview.
• minEditorHeight (number): The minimum height of the editor.
• maxEditorHeight (number): The max height of the editor (after that, it will scroll).
• minPreviewHeight (number): The minimum height of the preview.
• loadSuggestions (text: string, triggeredBy: string) => Promise<Suggestion[]>: Function to load mention suggestions based on the given text and triggeredBy (character that triggered the suggestions). The result should be an array of {preview: React.ReactNode, value: string}. The preview is what is going to be displayed in the suggestions box. The value is what is going to be inserted in the textarea on click or enter.
• suggestionTriggerCharacters (string[]): Characters that will trigger mention suggestions to be loaded. This property is useless without loadSuggestions.

Styling

The following styles from React-mde should be added: (Both .scss and .css files are available. No need to use sass-loader if you don't want)

Easiest way: import react-mde-all.css:

import 'react-mde/lib/styles/css/react-mde-all.css';

If you want to have a more granular control over the styles, you can import each individual file.

If you're using SASS, you can override these variables: https://github.com/andrerpena/react-mde/blob/master/src/styles/variables.scss

XSS concerns

React-mde does not automatically sanitize the HTML preview. If your using Showdown, this has been taken from their documentation:

Cross-side scripting is a well known technique to gain access to private information of the users of a website. The attacker injects spurious HTML content (a script) on the web page which will read the user’s cookies and do something bad with it (like steal credentials). As a countermeasure, you should filter any suspicious content coming from user input. Showdown doesn’t include an XSS filter, so you must provide your own. But be careful in how you do it…

You might want to take a look at showdown-xss-filter.

Starting from version 7.4, it is also possible to return a Promise to a React Element from generateMarkdownPreview, which makes it possible to use ReactMarkdown as a preview. View issue. ReactMarkdown has built-in XSS protection.

Commands

You can create your own commands or reuse existing commands. The commands property of React-mde expects an array of CommandGroup, which contains an array of commands called commands. You can also import the existing commands as displayed below:

import ReactMde, {commands} from "react-mde";

const listCommands = [
    {
        commands: [
            commands.orderedListCommand,
            commands.unorderedListCommand,
            commands.checkedListCommand
        ]
    }
]

<ReactMde
    commands={listCommands}
    ...
/>

Please refer to the commands source code to understand how they should be implemented.

Change log / Migrating from older versions

Instructions here.

Licence

React-mde is MIT licensed.

Third party

In order to make React-mde zero deps, I've embedded two small libraries:

• https://github.com/grassator/insert-text-at-cursor by https://twitter.com/d_kubyshkin
• https://github.com/JedWatson/classnames by https://twitter.com/JedWatson

About the author

Made with ❤️ by André Pena and other awesome contributors.