Build it yourself: Quill

I worked once on a legacy code base where there hundreds (or more!) of lines to implement a text editor. This code was an R shiny web application, and I noticed that this tool, a library that quickly loads a text editor didn’t exist in the R world.

So, I decided to build one myself.

Example

library(quill)
quill(toolbar_options(image = FALSE, video = FALSE))

Why Quill?

The idea for Quill came out of necessity. There wasn’t a simple tool in R that allowed developers to embed a rich text editor into their apps. Sure, there are solutions for forms, plots, and dashboards, but nothing specifically for polished text editing.

That’s when I discovered QuillJS, a lightweight JavaScript library for building text editors. It was exactly what I was looking for: clean, customizable, and perfect for embedding. But there was a problem—it wasn’t accessible from R. I’d have to bridge the gap. With the use of the R package htmlwidgets this was possible.

How to use quill?

Like any other htmlwidget, there is an UI function: quillOutput(), and a server function: renderQuill(). You can select the options of the toolbar with toolbar_options.

## basic example of functioning in Shiny
library(quill)

ui <- fluidPage(
  ... 
  quillOutput("text_editor")
  ...
)

server <- function(input, output, ...) {
  ...
  output$text_editor <- renderQuill({
    quill(toolbar = toolbar_options(code = TRUE)) 
  })

  # You can listen what the user is writing in HTML, JSON, and plain text
  observeEvent(input$text_editor_content, {
    get_editor_content(input$text_editor_content, format = "HTML")
  }
  ...
}

You can see an example Shiny app here.

What Quill Can Do

The Quill package makes it easy to:

• Add a modern text editor to Shiny apps or R Markdown documents.
• Customize the toolbar to include options like bold, italics, headers, or links.
• Retrieve and process user input in real-time. Lessons Learned

If you’ve ever thought, “Why isn’t there a package for this?” you’re not alone. The beauty of open-source is that if something doesn’t exist, you can build it. That’s what I did with Quill, and I hope it inspires others to do the same.

Try Quill out on GitHub and let me know how it works for you. I’m always open to feedback and new ideas!