A nice collection of TEXTAREA-replacement HTML Editors

May 31, 2007 — Dirk

For a project we are looking for a free Javascript library, that replaces TEXTAREA tags with an HTML WYSIWYG editor. Here are some of my findings:

OpenWYSIWYG 1.0: Licensed under LGPL. Loads considerable fast. Only one line of Javascript to replace existing TEXTAREAs. My current number 1
FCKeditor: Used in many commercial projects. Loads a little slower. More features that the forementioned. LGPL and Mozilla MPL.
TinyMCE: Again, loads even slower than FCKeditor but also has more features, good icons and design. LGPL. Too heavy for our project.
Kupu: Feature heavy and too huge for our project. Targeted at CMS systems.
eArea: As simple as it can get. Only supports bold/italic/left/right/centered.
xinha: Meant to be an online HTML editor (much more than a TEXTAREA replacement). To heavy for our project.

[Edit June 1st 2007]

I found another control which is even more basic than OpenWYSIWYG and doesn’t even have a name yet…