Halka

A headless, framework-agnostic rich text editor kernel for the web.

Live demo · Full documentation

Halka gives you a robust editing core — commands, queries, transforms, selection management, and a plugin system — without rendering any UI. You build the toolbar, menus, and chrome; Halka handles the DOM.

Features

• Headless — zero UI opinions; you own every pixel
• Plugin architecture — 10 first-party plugins (history, lists, tables, footnotes, find-replace, paste, and more)
• Clean DOM — collapsed formatting uses virtual “pending formats” instead of zero-width spaces
• Selection stability — selection is saved on blur and restored before operations
• Schema-aware — built-in block / inline / void categorization
• clearFormatting vs clearStyles — remove semantic tags or CSS style attributes separately

This repository also includes an optional Svelte UI (src/rich-text-editor/) used by the demo site. It is not published to npm.

Installation

pnpm add halka

Quick start

import { HalkaEditor } from 'halka';
import { historyPlugin } from 'halka/plugins/history';
import { pastePlugin } from 'halka/plugins/paste';
import { linkPlugin } from 'halka/plugins/link';
import { listPlugin } from 'halka/plugins/list';
import { imagePlugin } from 'halka/plugins/image';
import { tablePlugin } from 'halka/plugins/table';
import { footnotePlugin } from 'halka/plugins/footnote';
import { markdownShortcutsPlugin } from 'halka/plugins/markdown-shortcuts';
import { placeholderPlugin } from 'halka/plugins/placeholder';
import { findReplacePlugin } from 'halka/plugins/find-replace';

const root = document.getElementById('editor')!;

const editor = new HalkaEditor(root, {
  plugins: [
    historyPlugin,
    pastePlugin,
    linkPlugin,
    listPlugin,
    imagePlugin,
    tablePlugin,
    footnotePlugin,
    markdownShortcutsPlugin,
    findReplacePlugin,
    placeholderPlugin('Start writing…')
  ]
});

editor.setHTML('<p>Hello world</p>');

editor.on('change', (html) => {
  console.log('Content changed:', html);
});

editor.destroy();

Documentation

Detailed API reference, plugin commands, keyboard shortcuts, and interactive feature demos live on the docs site:

| Resource | URL | |----------|-----| | Documentation | https://halkaeditor.pages.dev/docs | | Core API | https://halkaeditor.pages.dev/docs/core | | Plugins | https://halkaeditor.pages.dev/docs/plugins/history | | Svelte UI (in-repo) | https://halkaeditor.pages.dev/docs/svelte-ui | | Live demo | https://halkaeditor.pages.dev/demo |

Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev          # local demo/docs site
pnpm build        # build package + static site (output: docs/)
pnpm run test     # unit + e2e
pnpm run test:unit
pnpm run test:e2e
pnpm run check    # svelte-check
pnpm run lint

License

MIT