README

A true WYSIWYG editor for Flarum 2 — TipTap, with no Markdown anywhere in the stack.

Both flarum/markdown and fof/rich-text can be uninstalled. Existing posts keep rendering exactly as they did, with no migration and no rewritten rows.

Why this exists

Every WYSIWYG editor for Flarum so far has been a rich editor sitting on top of Markdown: the document is serialised to Markdown on submit and re-parsed on load. That is why flarum/markdown is a hard dependency of fof/rich-text, and why Markdown syntax keeps leaking into a supposedly what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience — type **bold** and it turns bold, paste code with underscores and it turns italic.

Scribe removes the Markdown layer entirely. TipTap already speaks HTML natively, so dropping Markdown makes the pipeline simpler, not harder.

How your existing posts survive

Flarum stores posts as s9e TextFormatter XML, not as source text. The tag vocabulary in that XML — STRONG, EM, H2, LIST, LI, C … — belongs to s9e, not to Markdown. Markdown was only ever one parser feeding those tags.

Scribe emits the same vocabulary from HTML, and supplies templates for the tags flarum/markdown used to own. A post written years ago in Markdown and a post written today in Scribe are the same shape in the database and share one render path.

Uninstalling flarum/markdown without this would silently flatten every post you have: the text survives, every heading, bold, list and code span does not. That is not a warning drawn from theory — it is what happens, and it is the specific failure Scribe exists to prevent.

Where flarum/bbcode is enabled it keeps ownership of the tags it already provides (CODE, QUOTE, URL, IMG, LIST, LI, DEL, EMAIL), so syntax highlighting and quote citation are untouched.

Beyond Markdown

Because posts no longer have to be expressible in Markdown, Scribe adds what Markdown could not represent:

• Tables. s9e's Litedown has no table syntax at all, so on a Markdown forum a table renders as a paragraph full of pipes.
• Text colour, highlight and underline — colour by swatch or hex.
• Superscript and subscript, for footnote markers and formulae.
• Text alignment — left, centre, right, justify.
• Image alignment and resizing.
• Spoilers — a titled block the reader clicks to open.
• Info boxes — a titled callout for the thing people keep missing.
• Reply-to-view — content that stays folded away until the reader has replied to the discussion. Read the caveat below before you use it.

Reply-to-view is a nudge, not a lock

The gated content is in the page. It is sent to every reader in the post's HTML, and the browser is what hides it — so anyone who opens the developer tools, reads the page source, or disables CSS can read it without replying.

That makes it a fine way to encourage participation, and the wrong tool for anything you actually need withheld: no private information, nothing paid, no answer key. If a reader must not be able to see something, it cannot be in the post at all.

Build your own toolbar

Every feature is a chip you drag into the toolbar, in the order you want it. Nothing is forced on your members, and nothing you remove is still lurking behind a keyboard shortcut.

Keyboard users get the same control: Enter adds a feature, arrow keys move it, Delete removes it.

Performance

TipTap and ProseMirror are about 430KB. Bundling that into forum.js means every visitor downloads, parses and executes it on every page view — including guests who cannot post at all. That is what made earlier TipTap editors feel heavy.

Scribe loads the editor in a separate chunk, on first use:

The toolbar also re-renders only when the set of active buttons actually changes, rather than on every keystroke.

Works with what you already run

• Mentions — unchanged. @name autocomplete and rendering are untouched.
• Quoting a post — flarum/mentions inserts Markdown through the editor interface; Scribe translates it into a real blockquote.
• FoF Upload — inserts ![alt](url); Scribe turns it into a real image node.
• flarum/bbcode — keep it or don't; Scribe defers to it where they overlap.

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/scribe
php flarum cache:clear

Then disable flarum/markdown (and remove fof/rich-text, which Scribe conflicts with). Your existing posts will render exactly as before.

Requirements

• Flarum 2.0
• PHP 8.3+

Licence

MIT.

Changelog

Every release, with what changed and why: CHANGELOG.md.