Same experience here. They changed APIs with no warning at version 0.46, breaking whatever spotty iOS/Android support they had. That’s not a knock against them: mobile contentEditable is terribly difficult to get right. But the surprise total deprecation of their stable branch was uncool to say the least, even if they did warn the software was beta. I heard Slate raised money to fix Android support, but whether or not that’s true, the whole thing was a really bad experience.

I also wholeheartedly recommend ProseMirror. It’s a bit complicated in some ways, but it works across platforms, is used in production widely at big companies despite sort of flying under the radar, and has been stable for years. If you’re looking for a fully baked React integration, TipTap[0] seems really nice, or if something minimalist then a plug for my own integration: use-prosemirror[1].

[0] https://www.tiptap.dev

[1] https://github.com/dminkovsky/use-prosemirror

Never seen tiptip before, looks pretty slick.

At work we need only the most basic customization (some inline spans for template vars) and we've cobbled together a Draft.JS implementation that's pretty buggy and has random runtime errors (unhandled nulls internal to the Draft.JS code).

Yes, I looked at TipTap for a while recently and the API looks like a really nice layer on top of ProseMirror.

Draft.js was another far out experience for me. I built the first attempt at my app with it, only to discover that Draft.js didn't work on Android. It was buggy on iOS, but on Android just didn't work. If you've been using Draft.js you probably remember Android support landing with the huge PR from Fabio M. Costa at GoDaddy[0], but by then I had already decided I needed to find something else. That PR actually led me to ProseMirror:

> This approach is the one used by Prosemirror (see https://github.com/ProseMirror/prosemirror-view/blob/master/...), which is the only Rich Text Editor I've tried that works well on Android. [1]

When I looked at ProseMirror, I was spooked by the apparent complexity. Tried Quill, Trix (worked great, but uncustomizable) and then went with Slate, only to have the above-mentioned experience. Remembered that comment on the PR, and redid my editor in ProseMirror, which finally was something that worked. Thank you Marijn and the ProseMirror community. It's been a journey with these editors.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/pull/2035

[1] https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/pull/2035#issue-2613622...

Same, I switched after a long stretch in 2020 where Slate bug fix PRs stagnated. I find the ProseMirror API less intuitive but overall it has fewer bugs and I have been able to customize it pretty heavily.

I had a similar experience. On a project I'm working we had to support IE11. Slate docs mentioned that it doesn't fully support IE11 out of the box, but that support can be achieved using polyfills. This turned out to be false and that part of documentation was very old and inaccurate unfortunately.

After few weeks of development we ran into IE11 issues we couldn't fix and Slate devs expressed that they are not at all interested in supporting IE11 in any way, which is a fair point of course since IE11 is on its way out and supporting it is a big chore. There were some PRs that were supposed to address some of the issues, but development is kinda all over the place on Slate so we weren't confident enough to go with it and decided to switch to ProseMirror.

It hasn't been easy and ProseMirror can be complicated, but we managed to work it out and created what we needed.

This has been my experience with Slate few years ago. The breaking changes were too frequent to stay productive and the project needed more baby sitting than we'd have liked.