News in the Rails world. DHH just announced that the Rails team is working towards bringing Trix, the rich text editor from Basecamp, into Rails applications by default as Action Text.
In a video, he showed quickly how to get started with Action Text by building a blog with a rich text area. This shows off some other things coming to Rails 6, like the default use of webpacker. Action Text hooks closely into Active Storage which was only new in Rails 5.2. Take a look at the video and see what you think:
Is this something you're excited to see in Rails? Have you had a need for rich text and struggled to use something that works well? Will this get you to install the edge version of Rails to try it out?
What do you think?
Latest comments (17)
ok cool. appreciate the message.
I"ll have to rip out the good bits of action text in terms of its parsing capabilities and handle the storage myself. seems like a tall order!
Hi Michael, would be very interested to hear if you've managed to get action text working with Shrine, especially to display images in-line in rich text. If so, would be interested to hear your thoughts / how you did it.
I've stopped using Rails just before version 5 (nothing personal, just switched to different projects),so I might not know about the latest development (I followed release notes from 5 and 5.1), but adding a text editor by default feels more like a feature of a CMS, not a framework.
The bare minimum a front-end needs to satisfy user demands are forms, buttons, and inputs. This is just a specialized and decorated input, and I see little problem with providing it using the same logic that I have little problem with providing front-end decorators to aid form validation.
I tend to agree. I was setting up a new Rails 5 app recently in a very specific way and felt like it took a while just to turn off all the stuff I didn't want in there. While I dug CoffeeScript a few years ago, I'm more inclined to do ES7 nowdays, and I don't want to use minitest, and I don't want to dev on Sqllite, and don't even get me started on Webpack... Maybe because I don't necc. build projects in "The Rails Way", which could be my own flaw.
Wasn't that the whole point of Rails "templates"? Wouldn't it make more sense to just point people toward a "kitchen-sink" template and have it do all the things - versus having a bunch of things you don't need in there by default? Or, add a slim version to rails new. I was happy to see --api, maybe there should now be a --slim without all the extras?
I'd also question whether this is a "good thing" for a new rails user. In the beginning, it was very simple, things made sense, and it was fairly compact (compared to, say, a default .NET web project). Now even as a long time rails user, it seems WAY more complex than it needs to be.
Hey Phil, thanks for bringing this up on dev.to! I came across your post before I even saw the announcement from DHH. One of our devs linked to your post/discussion from our company blog on a writeup about Action Text for Rails 6.
It's a great addition to Rails. I'm really pleased they've added this. I'm surprised there's so much hostility. Just turn it off if you don't want to use it. Simple.
I have to think the people focused on
ActiveStoragefeatures aren't being bottlenecked by work like this. I that the feature is questionable but I can't imagine it was a huge burden on the rest of Rails' productivity.For any newbies like me who never ran Rails from the source I created a step by step guide to reproduce the DHH example of the video
dev.to/adrienpoly/step-by-step-gui...
I've used both ActiveStorage and trix. From what I've seen, both are great separately. I haven't used them together yet. This seems like a natural default to me.
When you start a new Rails app, many of these tools are configurable. You can choose to get setup with webpacker (and Stimulus, React, Vue, etc.) or not. ActiveStorage is the same. You can choose to turn it off. My guess is trix will be the same way. I like this way of doing things. Provide a nice set of defaults for people wanting to build web apps and easy ways to disable or change those defaults.
trix is a great editor. It's one of the best I've used. I like the default and you can (hopefully) choose not to use it if you have something else in mind.