This package contains the core logic of Slate. It's separated further into a series of directories:

• Changes — containing the changes that are used to alter a Slate document.
• Constants — containing constants that are used in Slate's codebase.
• Models — containing the models that define Slate's data structure.
• Operations — containing the low-level operations that create Slate changes.
• Schemas - containing the core schema that ships with Slate by default.
• Utils — containing a few private convenience modules.

Feel free to poke around in each of them to learn more!

Changelog

This document maintains a list of changes to the slate package with each new version. Until 1.0.0 is released, breaking changes will be added as minor version bumps, and smaller changes won't be accounted for since the library is moving quickly.

0.33.0 — February 21, 2018

BREAKING

• Void nodes no longer prescribe their text content. Previously void nodes would automatically normalize their text content to be a single text node containing ' ' an empty string of content. This restriction was removed, so that void nodes can have arbitrary content. You can use this to store information in void nodes in a way that is more consistent with non-void nodes.

DEPRECATED

• The setBlock method has been renamed to setBlocks. This is to make it more clear that it operates on any of the current blocks in the selection, not just a single blocks.

• The setInline method has been renamed to setInlines. For the same reason as setBlocks, to be clear and stay consistent.

0.32.0 — January 4, 2018

BREAKING

• The kind property of Slate objects has been renamed to object. This is to reduce the confusion over the difference between "kind" and "type" which are practically synonyms. The "object" name was chosen to match the Stripe API, since it seems like a sensible choice and reads much more nicely when looking through JSON.

• All normalization reasons containing kind have been renamed too. Previously there were normalization reason strings like child_kind_invalid. These types of strings have been renamed to child_object_invalid to stay consistent.

0.31.0 — November 16, 2017

BREAKING

• Operation objects in Slate are now immutable records. Previously they were native, mutable Javascript objects. Now, there's a new immutable Operation model in Slate, ensuring that all of the data inside Value objects are immutable. And it allows for easy serialization of operations using operation.toJSON() for when sending them between editors. This should not affect most users, unless you are relying on changing the values of the low-level Slate operations (simply reading them is fine).

• Operation lists in Slate are now immutable lists. Previously they were native, mutable Javascript arrays. Now, to keep consistent with other immutable uses, they are immutable lists. This should not affect most users.

NEW

• Added a new Operation model. This model is used to store operations for the history stack, and (de)serializes them in a consistent way for collaborative editing use cases.

0.30.0 — October 27, 2017

BREAKING

• Remove all previously deprecated code paths. This helps to reduce some of the complexity in Slate by not having to handle these code paths anymore. And it helps to reduce file size. When upgrading, it's highly recommended that you upgrade to the previous version first and ensure there are no deprecation warnings being logged, then upgrade to this version.

0.29.0 — October 27, 2017

BREAKING

• The set_state operation has been renamed set_value. This shouldn't affect almost anyone, but in the event that you were relying on the low-level operation types you'll need to update this.

DEPRECATED

• The "state" has been renamed to "value" everywhere. All of the current references are maintained as deprecations, so you should be able to upgrade and see warnings logged instead of being greeted with a broken editor. This is to reduce the confusion between React's "state" and Slate's editor value, and in an effort to further mimic the native DOM APIs.

NEW

• Added the new Value model to replace State. The new model is exactly the same, but with a new name. There is also a shimmed State model exported that warns when used, to ease migration.

0.28.0 — October 25, 2017

BREAKING

• The Schema objects in Slate have changed! Previously, they used to be where you could define normalization rules, define rendering rules, and define decoration rules. This was overloaded, and made other improvements hard. Now, rendering and decorating is done via the newly added plugin functions (renderNode, renderMark, decorateNode). And validation is done either via the lower-level validateNode plugin function, or via the new schema objects.

• The normalize* change methods no longer take a schema argument. Previously you had to maintain a reference to your schema, and pass it into the normalize methods when you called them. Since State objects now have an embedded state.schema property, this is no longer needed.

NEW

• State objects now have an embedded state.schema property. This new schema property is used to automatically normalize the state as it changes, according to the editor's current schema. This makes normalization much easier.

0.27.0 — October 14, 2017

BREAKING

• The Range model is now called Leaf. This is to disambiguate with the concept of "ranges" that is used throughout the codebase to be synonymous to selections. For example in methods like getBlocksAtRange(selection).

• The text.ranges property in the JSON representation is now text.leaves. When passing in JSON with text.ranges you'll now receive a deprecation warning in the console in development.

DEPRECATED

• The Selection model is now called Range. This is to make it more clear what a "selection" really is, to make many of the other methods that act on "ranges" make sense, and to more closely parallel the native DOM API for selections and ranges. A mock Selection object is still exported with deprecated static methods, to make the transition to the new API easier.

• The Text.getRanges() method is now Text.getLeaves(). It will still work, and it will return a list of leaves, but you will see a deprecation warning in the console in development.

0.26.0 — October 13, 2017

BREAKING

• The decorate function of schema rules has changed. Previously, in decorate you would receive a text node and the matched node, and you'd need to manually add any marks you wanted to the text node's characters. Now, "decorations" have changed to just be Selection objects with marks in the selection.marks property. Instead of applying the marks yourself, you simply return selection ranges with the marks to be applied, and Slate will apply them internally. This makes it possible to write much more complex decoration behaviors. Check out the revamped code-highlighting example and the new search-highlighting example to see this in action.

• The set_data operation type has been replaced by set_state. With the new state.decorations property, it doesn't make sense to have a new operation type for every property of State objects. Instead, the new set_state operation more closely mimics the existing set_mark and set_node operations.

DEPRECATED

• The setData change method has been replaced by setState. Previously you would call change.setData(data). But as new State properties are introduced it doesn't make sense to need to add new change methods each time. Instead, the new change.setState(properties) more closesely mimics the existing setMarkByKey and setNodeByKey. To achieve the old behavior, you can do change.setState({ data }).

• The preserveStateData option of state.toJSON has changed. The same behavior is now called preserveData instead. This makes it consistent with all of the existing options, and the new preserveDecorations option as well.

NEW

• You can now set decorations based on external information. Previously, the "decoration" logic in Slate was always based off of the text of a node, and would only re-render when that text changed. Now, there is a new state.decorations property that you can set via change.setState({ decorations }). You can use this to add presentation-only marks to arbitrary ranges of text in the document. Check out the new search-highlighting example to see this in action.

0.25.0 — September 21, 2017

BREAKING

• The insertBlock change method no longer replaces empty blocks. Previously if you used insertBlock and the selection was in an empty block, it would replace it. Now you'll need to perform that check yourself and use the new replaceNodeByKey method instead.

• The Block.create and Inline.create methods no longer normalize. Previously if you used one of them to create a block or inline with zero nodes in it, they would automatically add a single empty text node as the only child. This was unexpected in certain situations, and if you were relying on this you'll need to handle it manually instead now.

0.24.0 — September 11, 2017

BREAKING

• immutable is now a peer dependency of Slate. Previously it was a regular dependency, but this prevented you from bringing your own version, or you'd have duplication. You'll need to ensure you install it!

• The Html, Plain and Raw serializers are broken into new packages. Previously you'd import them from slate. But now you'll import them from slate-html-serializer and slate-plain-serializer. And the Raw serializer that was deprecated is now removed.

• The Editor and Placeholder components are broken into a new React-specific package. Previously you'd import them from slate. But now you import { Editor } from 'slate-react' instead.

NEW

• Slate is now a "monorepo". Instead of a single package, Slate has been divided up into individual packages so that you can only require what you need, cutting down on file size. In the process, some helpful modules that used to be internal-only are now exposed.

• There's a new slate-hyperscript helper. This was possible thanks to the work on slate-sugar, which paved the way.

• The slate-prop-types package is now exposed. Previously this was an internal module, but now you can use it for adding prop types to any components or plugins you create.

• The slate-simulator package is now exposed. Previously this was an internal testing utility, but now you can use it in your own tests as well. It's currently pretty bare bones, but we can add to it over time.

0.23.0 — September 10, 2017

BREAKING

• The isNative property of State has been removed. Previously this was used for performance reasons to avoid re-rendering, but it is no longer needed. This shouldn't really affect most people because it's rare that you'd be relying on this property to exist.

DEPRECATED

• The Raw serializer is now deprecated. The entire "raw" concept is being removed, in favor of allowing all models to be able to serialize and deserialize to JSON themselves. Instead of using the Raw serializer, you can now use the fromJSON and toJSON on the models directly.

• The toRaw options for the Plain and Html serializers are now called toJSON. This is to stay symmetrical with the removal of the "raw" concept everywhere.

• The terse option for JSON serialization has been deprecated! This option causes lots of abstraction leakiness because it means there is no one canonical JSON representation of objects. You had to work with either terse or not terse data.

• The Html serializer no longer uses the terse representation. This shouldn't actually be an issue for anyone because the main manifestation of this has a deprecation notice with a patch in place for now.

• The defaultBlockType of the Html serializer is now called defaultBlock. This is just to make it more clear that it supports not only setting the default type but also data and isVoid.

NEW

• Slate models now have Model.fromJSON(object) and model.toJSON() methods. These methods operate with the canonical JSON form (which used to be called "raw"). This way you don't need to import a serializer to retrieve JSON, if you have the model you can serialize/deserialize.

• Models also have toJS and fromJS aliases. This is just to match Immutable.js objects, which have both methods. For Slate though, the methods are equivalent.

0.22.0 — September 5, 2017

BREAKING

• The Plain serializer now adds line breaks between blocks. Previously between blocks the text would be joined without any space whatsoever, but this wasn't really that useful or what you'd expect.

• The toggleMark transform now checks the intersection of marks. Previously, toggling would remove the mark from the range if any of the characters in a range didn't have it. However, this wasn't what all other rich-text editors did, so the behavior has changed to mimic the standard behavior. Now, if any characters in the selection have the mark applied, it will first be added when toggling.

• The .length property of nodes has been removed. This property caused issues with code like in Lodash that checked for "array-likeness" by simply looking for a .length property that was a number.

• onChange now receives a Change object (previously named Transform) instead of a State. This is needed because it enforces that all changes are represented by a single set of operations. Otherwise right now it's possible to do things like state.transform()....apply({ save: false }).transform()....apply() and result in losing the operation information in the history. With OT, we need all transforms that may happen to be exposed and emitted by the editor. The new syntax looks like:

onChange(change) {
  this.setState({ state: change.state })
}

onChange({ state }) {
  this.setState({ state })
}

• Similarly, handlers now receive e, data, change instead of e, data, state. Instead of doing return state.transform()....apply() the plugins can now act on the change object directly. Plugins can still return change... if they want to break the stack from continuing on to other plugins. (Any != null value will break out.) But they can also now not return anything, and the stack will apply their changes and continue onwards. This was previously impossible. The new syntax looks like:

function onKeyDown(e, data, change) {
  if (data.key == 'enter') {
    return change.splitBlock()
  }
}

• The onChange and on[Before]Change handlers now receive Change objects. Previously they would also receive a state object, but now they receive change objects like the rest of the plugin API.

• The .apply({ save }) option is now state.change({ save }) instead. This is the easiest way to use it, but requires that you know whether to save or not up front. If you want to use it inline after already saving some changes, you can use the change.setOperationFlag('save', true) flag instead. This shouldn't be necessary for 99% of use cases though.

• The .undo() and .redo() transforms don't save by default. Previously you had to specifically tell these transforms not to save into the history, which was awkward. Now they won't save the operations they're undoing/redoing by default.

• onBeforeChange is no longer called from componentWillReceiveProps, when a new state is passed in as props to the <Editor> component. This caused lots of state-management issues and was weird in the first place because passing in props would result in changes firing. It is now the parent component's responsibility to not pass in improperly formatted State objects.

• The splitNodeByKey change method has changed to be shallow. Previously, it would deeply split to an offset. But now it is shallow and another splitDescendantsByKey change method has been added (with a different signature) for the deep splitting behavior. This is needed because splitting and joining operations have been changed to all be shallow, which is required so that operational transforms can be written against them.

• Blocks cannot have mixed "inline" and "block" children anymore. Blocks were implicitly expected to either contain "text" and "inline" nodes only, or to contain "block" nodes only. Invalid case are now normalized by the core schema.

• The shape of many operations has changed. This was needed to make operations completely invertible without any extra context. The operations were never really exposed in a consumable way, so I won't detail all of the changes here, but feel free to look at the source to see the details.

• All references to "joining" nodes is now called "merging". This is to be slightly clearer, since merging can only happen with adjacent nodes already, and to have a nicer parallel with "splitting", as in cells. The operation is now called merge_node, and the transforms are now merge*.

DEPRECATED

• The transform.apply() method is deprecated. Previously this is where the saving into the history would happen, but it created an awkward convention that wasn't necessary. Now operations are saved into the history as they are created with change methods, instead of waiting until the end. You can access the new State of a change at any time via change.state.

NEW

• The state.activeMarks returns the intersection of marks in the selection. Previously there was only state.marks which returns marks that appeared on any character in the selection. But state.activeMarks returns marks that appear on every character in the selection, which is often more useful for implementing standard rich-text editor behaviors.

0.21.0 — July 20, 2017

BREAKING

• The Html serializer now uses DOMParser instead of cheerio. Previously, the Html serializer used the cheerio library for representing elements in the serialization rule logic, but cheerio was a very large dependency. It has been removed, and the native browser DOMParser is now used instead. All HTML serialization rules will need to be updated. If you are working with Slate on the server, you can now pass in a custom serializer to the Html constructor, using the parse5 library.

0.20.0 — May 17, 2017

BREAKING

• Returning null from the Html serializer skips the element. Previously, null and undefined had the same behavior of skipping the rule and trying the rest of the rules. Now if you explicitly return null it will skip the element itself.

0.19.0 — March 3, 2017

BREAKING

• The filterDescendants and findDescendants methods are now depth-first. This shouldn't affect almost anyone, since they are usually not the best things to be using for performance reasons. If you happen to have a very specific use case that needs breadth-first, (or even likely something better), you'll need to implement it yourself.

DEPRECATED

• Some Node methods have been deprecated! There were a few methods that had been added over time that were either poorly named that have been deprecated and renamed, and a handful of methods that are no longer useful for the core library that have been deprecated. Here's a full list:
  • areDescendantSorted -> areDescendantsSorted
  • getHighestChild -> getFurthestAncestor
  • getHighestOnlyChildParent -> getFurthestOnlyChildAncestor
  • concatChildren
  • decorateTexts
  • filterDescendantsDeep
  • findDescendantDeep
  • getChildrenBetween
  • getChildrenBetweenIncluding
  • isInlineSplitAtRange

0.18.0 — March 2, 2017

BREAKING

• The plugin.render property is now called plugin.renderPortal. This is to make way for the new plugin.render property that offers HOC-like behavior, so that plugins can augment the editor however they choose.

0.17.0 — February 27, 2017

DEPRECATED

• Some Selection methods have been deprecated! Previously there were many inconsistencies in the naming and handling of selection changes. This has all been cleaned up, but in the process some methods have been deprecated. Here is a full list of the deprecated methods and their new alternatives:

  • moveToOffsets -> moveOffsetsTo
  • moveForward -> move
  • moveBackward -> move
  • moveAnchorOffset -> moveAnchor
  • moveFocusOffset -> moveFocus
  • moveStartOffset -> moveStart
  • moveEndOffset -> moveEnd
  • extendForward -> extend
  • extendBackward -> extend
  • unset -> deselect

• Some selection transforms have been deprecated! Along with the methods, the selection-based transforms have also been refactored, resulting in deprecations. Here is a full list of the deprecated transforms and their new alternatives:

  • moveTo -> select
  • moveToOffsets -> moveOffsetsTo
  • moveForward -> move
  • moveBackward -> move
  • moveStartOffset -> moveStart
  • moveEndOffset -> moveEnd
  • extendForward -> extend
  • extendBackward -> extend
  • flipSelection -> flip
  • unsetSelection -> deselect
  • unsetMarks

0.16.0 — December 2, 2016

BREAKING

• Inline nodes are now always surrounded by text nodes. Previously this behavior only occured for inline nodes with isVoid: true. Now, all inline nodes will always be surrounded by text nodes. If text nodes don't exist, empty ones will be created. This allows for more consistent behavior across Slate, and parity with other editing experiences.

0.15.0 - November 17, 2016

BREAKING

• The unique key generated values have changed. Previously, Slate generated unique keys that looked like '9dk3'. But they were not very conflict-resistant. Now the keys are simple string of auto-incrementing numbers, like '0', '1', '2'. This makes more clear that keys are simply a convenient way to uniquely reference nodes in the short-term lifespan of a single in-memory instance of Slate. They are not designed to be used for long-term uniqueness. A new setKeyGenerator function has been exported that allows you to pass in your own key generating mechanism if you want to ensure uniqueness.

• The Raw serializer doesn't preserve keys by default. Previously, the Raw serializer would omit keys when passed the terse: true option, but preserve them without it. Now it will always omit keys, unless you pass the new preserveKeys: true option. This better reflects that keys are temporary, in-memory IDs.

• Operations on the document now update the selection when needed. This won't affect you unless you were doing some very specific things with transforms and updating selections. Overall, this makes it much easier to write transforms, since in most cases, the underlying operations will update the selection as you would expect without you doing anything.

DEPRECATED

• Node accessor methods no longer accept being passed another node! Previously, node accessor methods like node.getParent could be passed either a key string or a node object. For performance reasons, passing in a node object is being deprecated. So if you have any calls that look like: node.getParent(descendant), they will now need to be written as node.getParent(descendant.key). They will throw a warning for now, and will throw an error in a later version of Slate.

0.14.0 — September 10, 2016

BREAKING

• The undo and redo transforms need to be applied! Previously, undo and redo were special cased such that they did not require an .apply() call, and instead would return a new State directly. Now this is no longer the case, and they are just like every other transform.

• Transforms are no longer exposed on State or Node. The transforms API has been completely refactored to be built up of "operations" for collaborative editing support. As part of this refactor, the transforms are now only available via the state.transform() API, and aren't exposed on the State or Node objects as they were before.

• Transform objects are now mutable. Previously Transform was an Immutable.js Record, but now it is a simple constructor. This is because transforms are inherently mutating their representation of a state, but this decision is up for discussion.

• The selection can now be "unset". Previously, a selection could never be in an "unset" state where the anchorKey or focusKey was null. This is no longer technically true, although this shouldn't really affect anyone in practice.

0.13.0 — August 15, 2016

BREAKING

• The renderNode and renderMark properties are gone! Previously, rendering nodes and marks happened via these two properties of the <Editor>, but this has been replaced by the new schema property. Check out the updated examples to see how to define a schema! There's a good chance this eliminates extra code for most use cases! :smile:

• The renderDecorations property is gone! Decoration rendering has also been replaced by the new schema property of the <Editor>.

0.12.0 — August 9, 2016

BREAKING

• The data.files property is now an Array. Previously it was a native FileList object, but needed to be changed to add full support for pasting an dropping files in all browsers. This shouldn't affect you unless you were specifically depending on it being array-like instead of a true Array.

0.11.0 — August 4, 2016

BREAKING

• Void nodes are renderered implicitly again! Previously Slate had required that you wrap void node renderers yourself with the exposed <Void> wrapping component. This was to allow for selection styling, but a change was made to make selection styling able to handled in Javascript. Now the <Void> wrapper will be implicitly rendered by Slate, so you do not need to worry about it, and "voidness" only needs to toggled in one place, the isVoid: true property of a node.

0.10.0 — July 29, 2016

BREAKING

• Marks are now renderable as components. Previously the only supported way to render marks was by returning a style object. Now you can return a style object, a class name string, or a full React component. Because of this, the DOM will be renderered slightly differently than before, resulting in an extra <span> when rendering non-component marks. This won't affect you unless you were depending on the DOM output by Slate for some reason.

0.9.0 — July 28, 2016

BREAKING

• The wrap and unwrap method signatures have changed! Previously, you would pass type and data as separate parameters, for example: wrapBlock('code', { src: true }). This was inconsistent with other transforms, and has been updated such that a single argument of properties is passed instead. So that example could now be: wrapBlock({ type: 'code', { data: { src: true }}). You can still pass a type string as shorthand, which will be the most frequent use case, for example: wrapBlock('code').

0.8.0 — July 27, 2016

BREAKING

• The onKeyDown and onBeforeInput handlers signatures have changed! Previously, some Slate handlers had a signature of (e, state, editor) and others had a signature of (e, data, state, editor). Now all handlers will be passed a data object—which contains Slate-specific data related to the event—even if it is empty. This is helpful for future compatibility where we might need to add data to a handler that previously didn't have any, and is nicer for consistency. The onKeyDown handler's new data object contains the key name, code and a series of is* properties to make working with hotkeys easier. The onBeforeInput handler's new data object is empty.

• The Utils export has been removed. Previously, a Key utility and the findDOMNode utility were exposed under the Utils object. The Key has been removed in favor of the data object passed to onKeyDown. And then findDOMNode utility has been upgraded to a top-level named export, so you'll now need to access it via import { findDOMNode } from 'slate'.

• Void nodes now permanently have " " as content. Previously, they contained an empty string, but this isn't technically correct, since they have content and shouldn't be considered "empty". Now they will have a single space of content. This shouldn't really affect anyone, unless you happened to be accessing that string for serialization.

• Empty inline nodes are now impossible. This is to stay consistent with native contenteditable behavior, where although technically the elements can exist, they have odd behavior and can never be selected.

0.7.0 — July 24, 2016

BREAKING

• The Raw serializer is no longer terse by default! Previously, the Raw serializer would return a "terse" representation of the document, omitting information that wasn't strictly necessary to deserialize later, like the key of nodes. By default this no longer happens. You have to opt-in to the behavior by passing { terse: true } as the second options argument of the deserialize and serialize methods.

0.6.0 — July 22, 2016

BREAKING

• Void components are no longer rendered implicity! Previously, Slate would automatically wrap any node with isVoid: true in a <Void> component. But doing this prevented you from customizing the wrapper, like adding a className or style property. So you must now render the wrapper yourself, and it has been exported as Slate.Void. This, combined with a small change to the <Void> component's structure allows the "selected" state of void nodes to be rendered purely with CSS based on the :focus property of a <Void> element, which previously had to be handled in Javascript. This allows us to streamline selection-handling logic, improving performance and reducing complexity.

• data-offset-key is now <key>-<index> instead of <key>:<start>-<end>. This shouldn't actually affect anyone, unless you were specifically relying on that attribute in the DOM. This change greatly reduces the number of re-renders needed, since previously any additional characters would cause a cascading change in the <start> and <end> offsets of latter text ranges.

0.5.0 — July 20, 2016

BREAKING

• node.getTextNodes() is now node.getTexts(). This is just for consistency with the other existing Node methods like getBlocks(), getInlines(), etc. And it's nicely shorter. :wink:

• Node methods now throw earlier during unexpected states. This shouldn't break anything for most folks, unless a strange edge-case was going undetected previously.

0.4.0 — July 20, 2016

BREAKING

• renderMark(mark, state, editor) is now renderMark(mark, marks, state, editor). This change allows you to render marks based on multiple marks presence at once on a given range of text, for example using a custom BoldItalic.otf font when text has both bold and italic marks.

0.3.0 — July 20, 2016

BREAKING

• transform.unwrapBlock() now unwraps selectively. Previously, calling unwrapBlock with a range representing a middle sibling would unwrap all of the siblings, removing the wrapping block entirely. Now, calling it with those same arguments will only move the middle sibling up a layer in the hierarchy, preserving the nesting on any of its siblings. This changes makes it much simpler to implement functionality like unwrapping a single list item, which previously would unwrap the entire list.

0.2.0 — July 18, 2016

BREAKING

• transform.mark() is now transform.addMark() and transform.unmark() is now transform.removeMark(). The new names make it clearer that the transforms are actions being performed, and it paves the way for adding a toggleMark convenience as well.

0.1.0 — July 13, 2016

:tada: