For a while we’ve been exploring switching to WYSIWYG text editing in our products. Up until this point we’ve been using either plain text, manual HTML, or Textile formatting. Depending on who you are it’s either fine or annoying. We want to do a lot better.

We’ve looked at a lot of existing options (Yahoo’s WYSIWYG plug-in, TinyMCE, etc), but we weren’t happy with any of them. Currently available WYSIWYG editors don’t offer much flexibility when it comes to modifying their look and behavior. You are stuck with their HTML, buttons, and design. Modification was possible, but it was really ugly behind the scenes. We really needed a framework for building our own editor with beautiful code and a low cost of change.

WysiHat

So we decided to make our own. It’s called WysiHat and we’ve open sourced it. Get it? WysiHat. Hat instead of Wig? Funny, we know! Today we’re releasing a very stripped down early developer release.

WysiHat is a WYSIWYG JavaScript framework that provides an extensible foundation to design your own rich text editor. WysiHat stays out of your way and leaves the UI design to you. Although WysiHat lets you get up and running with a few lines of code, the focus is on letting you customize it.

We are giving developers early access to the project while we continue to work out the remaining issues. Note: It’s extremely early. Contributors are welcome so please check out the project on GitHub and send us your feedback.