react-mde

A simple yet powerful and extensible Markdown Editor editor for React. React-mde is built on top of Draft.js.

View demoView demo Download Source

Installing

npm i --save react-mde // or [email protected] for the same version available in the demos.

Dependencies

React-mde currently depends on:

  • Draft.js. This facilitates features that would otherwise be quite
    difficult. The best examples being history management, mentions and pasting files.
npm i --save draft-js
  • Font Awesome 5.* for the icons. This is not a hard dependency and there are plans to eliminate it altogether, but for now,
    the button classes are meant to be resolved by Font Awesome, which can be installed using your preferred method.
    The easiest is just add this to <head/>:
<script defer src="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.0.6/js/all.js"></script>

Optional dependencies

  • Showdown. React-mde is not opinionated as to how to transform markdown into HTML and this can be done both in client-side,
    like StackOverflow, or in server-side, like GitHub. The easiest way is to use Showdown and process it in client-side. If you
    decide to do so, install Showdown:
npm i --save showdown

Using

React-mde is a completely controlled component.

Minimal example using Showdown:

import * as React from "react";
import ReactMde, {ReactMdeTypes} from "../src";
import * as Showdown from "showdown";

export interface AppState {
    mdeState: ReactMdeTypes.MdeState;
}

export class App extends React.Component<{}, AppState> {

    converter: Showdown.Converter;

    constructor(props) {
        super(props);
        this.state = {
            mdeState: null,
        };
        this.converter = new Showdown.Converter({tables: true, simplifiedAutoLink: true});
    }

    handleValueChange = (mdeState: ReactMdeTypes.MdeState) => {
        this.setState({mdeState});
    }

    render() {
        return (
            <div className="container">
                <ReactMde
                    onChange={this.handleValueChange}
                    editorState={this.state.mdeState}
                    generateMarkdownPreview={(markdown) => Promise.resolve(this.converter.makeHtml(markdown))}
                />
            </div>
        );
    }
}

React-mde Props

The types are described below

  • editorState: MdeState: The state of the editor. This contains the markdown, the HTML and the underlying Draft.js state.
  • className?: string: Optional class name to be added to the top level element.
  • commands?: Command[][]: An array of array of commands. If no commands are specified, the default will be used. Commands are explained in more details below.
  • onChange: (value: MdeState) => void: Event handler for the onChange event.
  • generateMarkdownPreview: (markdown: string) => Promise;: Function that should return the generated HTML for the preview. If this prop is falsy, then no preview is going to be generated.
  • layout?: string: The name of the layout to be used. For now, the supported layouts are : vertical and noPreview.
  • layoutOptions?: any: An object with options to be passed to the layout-component. Each layout may or may not expect
    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.

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

You also need Font Awesome for the toolbar icons. Font Awesome 5 can be installed in different ways,
but the easiest is just adding this to the <head/>:

<script defer src="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.0.6/js/all.js"></script>

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.

Commands

React-mde allows you to use the build-in commands, implement your own commands, or both. If you wish
to implement your own commands, please refer to the commands source code to understand how they
should be implemented.

GitHub