One of Payload's goals is to build the best rich text editor experience that we possibly can. We want to combine the beauty and polish of the Medium editing experience with the strength and features of the Notion editor - all in one place.
Classically, we've used SlateJS to work toward this goal, but building custom elements into Slate has proven to be more difficult than we'd like, and we've been keeping our options open.
Lexical is extremely impressive and trivializes a lot of the hard parts of building new elements into a rich text editor. It has a few distinct advantages over Slate, including the following:
To use the Lexical editor, first you need to install it:
Once you have it installed, you can pass it to your top-level Payload Config as follows:
You can also override Lexical settings on a field-by-field basis as follows:
Lexical has been designed with extensibility in mind. Whether you're aiming to introduce new functionalities or tweak the existing ones, Lexical makes it seamless for you to bring those changes to life.
At the heart of Lexical's customization potential are "features". While Lexical ships with a set of default features we believe are essential for most use cases, the true power lies in your ability to redefine, expand, or prune these as needed.
If you remove all the default features, you're left with a blank editor. You can then add in only the features you need, or you can build your own custom features from scratch.
To weave in your custom features, utilize the features prop when initializing the Lexical Editor. Here's a basic example of how this is done:
features can be both an array of features, or a function returning an array of features. The function provides the following props:
| Prop | Description |
|---|---|
defaultFeatures | This opinionated array contains all "recommended" default features. You can see which features are included in the default features in the table below. |
rootFeatures | This array contains all features that are enabled in the root richText editor (the one defined in the payload.config.ts). If this field is the root richText editor, or if the root richText editor is not a lexical editor, this array will be empty. |
Here's an overview of all the included features:
| Feature Name | Included by default | Description |
|---|---|---|
BoldTextFeature | Yes | Handles the bold text format |
ItalicTextFeature | Yes | Handles the italic text format |
UnderlineTextFeature | Yes | Handles the underline text format |
StrikethroughTextFeature | Yes | Handles the strikethrough text format |
SubscriptTextFeature | Yes | Handles the subscript text format |
SuperscriptTextFeature | Yes | Handles the superscript text format |
InlineCodeTextFeature | Yes | Handles the inline-code text format |
ParagraphFeature | Yes | Handles paragraphs. Since they are already a key feature of lexical itself, this Feature mainly handles the Slash and Add-Block menu entries for paragraphs |
HeadingFeature | Yes | Adds Heading Nodes (by default, H1 - H6, but that can be customized) |
AlignFeature | Yes | Allows you to align text left, centered and right |
IndentFeature | Yes | Allows you to indent text with the tab key |
UnorderedListFeature | Yes | Adds unordered lists (ul) |
OrderedListFeature | Yes | Adds ordered lists (ol) |
CheckListFeature | Yes | Adds checklists |
LinkFeature | Yes | Allows you to create internal and external links |
RelationshipFeature | Yes | Allows you to create block-level (not inline) relationships to other documents |
BlockQuoteFeature | Yes | Allows you to create block-level quotes |
UploadFeature | Yes | Allows you to create block-level upload nodes - this supports all kinds of uploads, not just images |
HorizontalRuleFeature | Yes | Horizontal rules / separators. Basically displays an <hr> element |
InlineToolbarFeature | Yes | The inline toolbar is the floating toolbar which appears when you select text. This toolbar only contains actions relevant for selected text |
FixedToolbarFeature | No | This classic toolbar is pinned to the top and always visible. Both inline and fixed toolbars can be enabled at the same time. |
BlocksFeature | No | Allows you to use Payload's Blocks Field directly inside your editor. In the feature props, you can specify the allowed blocks - just like in the Blocks field. |
TreeViewFeature | No | Adds a debug box under the editor, which allows you to see the current editor state live, the dom, as well as time travel. Very useful for debugging |
EXPERIMENTAL_TableFeature | No | Adds support for tables. This feature may be removed or receive breaking changes in the future - even within a stable lexical release, without needing a major release. |
Notice how even the toolbars are features? That's how extensible our lexical editor is - you could theoretically create your own toolbar if you wanted to!
You can find more information about creating your own feature in our building custom feature docs.
Every single piece of saved data is 100% fully-typed within lexical. It provides a type for every single node, which can be imported from @payloadcms/richtext-lexical - each type is prefixed with Serialized, e.g. SerializedUploadNode.
In order to fully type the entire editor JSON, you can use our TypedEditorState helper type, which accepts a union of all possible node types as a generic. The reason we do not provide a type which already contains all possible node types is because the possible node types depend on which features you have enabled in your editor. Here is an example:
Alternatively, you can use the DefaultTypedEditorState type, which includes all types for all nodes included in the defaultFeatures:
Just like TypedEditorState, the DefaultTypedEditorState also accepts an optional node type union as a generic. Here, this would add the specified node types to the default ones. Example: DefaultTypedEditorState<SerializedBlockNode | YourCustomSerializedNode>.
This is a type-safe representation of the editor state. Looking at the auto-suggestions of type it will show you all the possible node types you can use.
Make sure to only use types exported from @payloadcms/richtext-lexical, not from the lexical core packages. We only have control over types we export and can guarantee that those are correct, even though lexical core may export types with identical names.
Lexical does not generate the accurate type definitions for your richText fields for you yet - this will be improved in the future. Currently, it only outputs the rough shape of the editor JSON which you can enhance using type assertions.