TinyMCE is not viable if users will be pasting content from Word documents, and generally does a terrible job of dealing with pasted styles...nearly impossible to override, so you end up pasting into Notepad, etc. etc. At my job, we're going to migrate our pilot Drupal sites from TinyMCe to FCKEditor due to this reason alone: To our users (content editors/admins who were stuck in Contribute before), this makes the Drupal software as a whole look bad. Even with the "Word Paste" plugin installed for TinyMCE, users have to click a special "Word Paste" button. This is silly, in FCKEditor you just paste normally.

One of my least computer-savvy clients for whom I built a Drupal site in the spring had absolutely no trouble using FCKEditor, while even I have a hard time wrangling some content in TinyMCE.

In short, TinyMCE's time has come and gone. It's still a decent RTE, but FCK has definitely surpassed it.

Even FCK occasionally has issues with pasting content from Word. Plus it's slow to load. It has improved over time, though, and is generally a reliable component. Considering the insane constraints rich text editors must operate under, it does an admirable job.

I tried creating a home-grown editor once. It was hard. Making one that's simple, predictable, and end-user friendly is nigh impossible.

I'm working on a jQuery-based one right now (with a matching Drupal module, which would make it light-weight, as Drupal bundles jQuery). Once you understand the nuances of designMode/contentEditable, things get easier, but I know what you mean about how much you need to consider. It might feel like wasted time when CKEditor 3 (smart name change, in my opinion), which looks like the real deal, is released on December 1st.

What I'd suggest for pasting Word content, regardless of editor, is to add a button that first puts the Word content through the server-side wvHtml tool, which extracts clean HTML from Word's awful formatting. I know TinyMCE has a plugin API for adding a new button for this to the editing options, and I'm sure the others do too.

TinyMCE in Joomla = atrocious.

WordPress also has a surprisingly bad text editor, considering how long they've been around.

Think they use this in the Confluence (popular commercial Wiki)... Wasn't impressed either - table handling could be a bit random.

That has as much to do with how bad Confluence Wiki Markup is as anything else. It doesn't allow any nesting of elements because an open tag is the same as a close tag:

  {panel}
  Content
  {panel} <- Close tag!

WTF? The same goes for tables:

  ||Header||Header||
  |Cel1|Cell|
  |Cell|Cell|

Terrible design for any markup language. Of course, we're talking about the same software that doesn't have templating (unless you count dumping form values into a fully editable page), doesn't support customization (yes, I've repeatedly been told this by customer service), doesn't support a custom homepage, or damn near anything else.

I can work with Confluence pretty well now, but I'm still bitter we chose it ata my job over something more flexible like MediaWiki.

Yeah - it is pretty flakey.

Part of the power is all the macros you can put in, but it becomes so complex that it approaches cranking out HTML...

So the confluence wiki quickly got full of these complex pages that only the author could edit without breaking - sort of went against the point of a wiki.

Luminotes, a much lighter wiki than Confluence, has its own rich text editor. It's simpler than many editors (e.g., no explicit table support yet), but many people prefer it perhaps because of that simplicity. More info at http://luminotes.com/

I would have liked a use comparison, not just a setup comparison.

But these have to be embedded by the webmasters, why doesn't someone make a rich text editor plugin for firefox, which would transform a regular textbox on any website to a decent editor (emacs, vim, etc.)

I made this guy http://utilitymill.com/utility/HTML_Tag_Matcher_andor_fixer to fix the crap tinyMCE in WordPress puts out. How can it manage to not match its divs anyway?

Several additional products mentioned in the comments. In particular, this commentor points to a separate review he wrote that addresses some different products:

http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-compar...

This is quite useful, as I'm building a custom CMS for my company right now. I thought we'd go with a heavily restricted tinyMCE,but it looks like WidgEditor is more along the lines of what I need. Small, light, and with just the right amount of features.

How about web based rich IDE's? :)

How about leaving text as it is and add some useful features?

How about leaving the web as it is and not trying to make it do things it shouldn't and doesn't need to?