Building a custom HTML editor for my React blog

Claudiu Cimpoies — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:29:00 +0000

While building my personal blog I experimented with Tiptap for the editor.

After a few weeks I realized something: it solved many problems, but it also introduced complexity I didn’t actually need.

At first I experimented with Tiptap, which is a very popular solution for rich text editing in React applications. It’s powerful and flexible, but after working with it for a while I realized it introduced more complexity than I actually needed.

My blog uses a custom content pipeline and a controlled HTML output, so debugging and controlling the generated markup became harder than expected.

Eventually I decided to take a different approach and build my own lightweight HTML editor.

The goals were simple:

full control over the generated HTML
predictable formatting output
minimal dependencies
easier debugging

Building a custom editor turned out to be a very interesting challenge, especially when dealing with formatting logic, preview rendering and content sanitization.

I wrote a detailed explanation on my
technical web development blog.

You can read the full article here:
building a custom HTML editor

If you’re building your own tools or experimenting with custom blog systems,
I’d be curious to hear what approach you chose !

Forem: Claudiu Cimpoies

Building a custom HTML editor for my React blog