MAmarijn·Oct 13, 2017
> Interested in hearing Marjin’s [sic] thoughts
Sure. I think it's fair to say that ProseMirror is a more ambitious project, reaching for features that aren't part of (even the new crop of) existing libraries.
* Firstly, the schema feature. ProseMirror's content expressions [1] are a regular language that can be used to describe a sequence of child nodes. The editor will make sure the content of the node always matches this expression. This allows significantly more interesting things than Quill's array of allowed children—i.e. "heading block＊ section＊" to say that a given node must first contain a heading, then any number of blocks (say, paragraph, list, figure, aside, etc), then any number of subsections. (HN's half assed markup doesn't seem to allow escapes on asterisks, so I used ＊'s)
* Quill uses imperative data structures and events
Read the rest
throughout. I've really become convinced of the power of functional Redux-style architectures for this kind of component—I've found it makes it much easier to write bullet-proof extensions. (This may be a matter of taste.)
* Table support doesn't appear to exist in Quill yet. A table module with features like colspan/rowspan and cell selections has been written as a relatively small plugin [2] for ProseMirror.
* Exposing all the system interals (and designing them in a way that makes them usable), rather than hiding stuff behind a small API, means that people can do really advanced things as extensions. This was a lot of work, and wasn't initially planned, but the kind of users we're aiming for require it.
* As for real-world use, yeah, we've just released 1.0, your project is older. Still, our users (including Atlassian, which has already rolled out ProseMirror in user-facing products) have been doing very advanced stuff already, and my ten years of experience with CodeMirror mean that I more or less know what I'm going to run into.
[1]: http://prosemirror.net/docs/guide/#schema.content_expression...
[2]: https://github.com/prosemirror/prosemirror-tables
(Also your website claims, wrt to ProseMirror: "Quill’s architecture is more modular, allowing for easier customization of internals. Core modules that handle basic functionality like copy/paste and undo/redo can be swapped out in Quill." I think that's a mischaracterization.)