Features

• Provides Rich Text (word processor-like), editing of HTML documents.
• Extensible toolbar with a default set of icons for common actions (bold, italic, underline, indent, and so on)
• Cross-browser support. The RTE capabilities of browsers vary in what they provide and how they are set up. The dijit.Editor abstracts this away and provides a single way to create a rich-text editing field in your pages.
• Built-in filtering support. The editor provides hooks to register HTML and DOM filters with the editor, to pre and post process data going in, or coming out of, the document being edited.
• Pluggable architecture. The editor's functionality can be extended by implementing and registering plugins with the editor. In fact, all the base commands of editor are effectively plugins. The plugin architecture makes it relatively easy to add new buttons and actions to the toolbar, to being 'headless', where it simply registers filters or augments existing actions.

Limitations

• Dijit/Editor uses an iframe to separate the document being edited from the rest of the content of your page. This helps protect your main page from being corrupted by editor content and vice-versa. But because of it being iframe isolated, the editor initializes asynchronously. To avoid any actions firing too early against editor content, you should make use of the 'onLoadDeferred' object of the editor. For example, see the following example that changes the content after init completes:

require(["dojo/parser", "dijit/Editor",  "dojo/domReady!"], function(parser){
    parser.parse();
    myEditor.onLoadDeferred.then(function(){
    myEditor.set("value", "<b>This is new content.</b>");
    });
});

<div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="myEditor">
    <p>This is the initial content.</p>
</div>

• The editor cannot be created on a hidden div. This is in large part due to the frames and similar. You will get odd browser errors should you attempt to create an editor on a hidden div.
• All browsers implement some of the underlying commands differently and may generate different markup, so do not expect identical markup out of each browser. All markup generated by any browser should render 'equivalently'.

Examples

require(["dojo/parser", "dijit/Editor"]);

<div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="editor1" data-dojo-props="onChange:function(){console.log('editor1 onChange handler: ' + arguments[0])}">
    <p>This instance is created from a div directly with default toolbar and plugins</p>
</div>

require(["dijit/Editor", "dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar", "dojo/dom", "dojo/query", "dojo/domReady!"],
function(Editor, AlwaysShowToolbar, dom, query){
    this.createEditor = function(){
        var myEditor = new Editor({
            height: '',
            extraPlugins: [AlwaysShowToolbar]
        }, dom.byId('programmatic2'));
        myEditor.startup();
        query('#create2').orphan();
    }
});

<div id="programmatic2">This div will become an auto-expanding editor.</div>
<button id="create2" onclick="createEditor();">
    create expanding editor
</button>

require(["dojo/parser", "dijit/Editor"]);

<div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="editor1" data-dojo-props="onChange:function(){console.log('editor1 onChange handler: ' + arguments[0])},
    plugins:['cut','copy','paste','|','bold','italic','underline','strikethrough','subscript','superscript','|', 'indent', 'outdent', 'justifyLeft', 'justifyCenter', 'justifyRight']">
    <p>This instance is created with a subset of functions enabled in the order we want</p>
</div>

Plugins

A plugin (a.k.a. extension) is something that adds a function to the editor, or changes it's behavior. Dojo includes a number of editor plugins, and developers can write additional plugins on their own.

Most plugins have an associated toolbar button(s), such as the FontChoice plugin (which has a drop down list for fonts), but some plugins (like AlwaysShowToolbar) just affect the Editor's behavior without changing the toolbar.

The "plugins" parameter controls which plugins are available, and also controls which builtin editor commands are available. It can also be used to re-arrange the default ordering of the buttons.

The basic plugins which are enabled by default are: undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, insertOrderedList, insertUnorderedList, indent, outdent, justifyLeft, justifyRight, justifyCenter, justifyFull, dijit._editor.plugins.EnterKeyHandling

If you want to just add plugins above and beyond the standard configuration, then you should use the "extraPlugins" parameter.

Both the "plugins" parameter and the "extraPlugins" parameter are arrays, where each element in the array can be a simple string or an object (if you need to set options on a plugin).

This example adds the text color, background color, and font selection plugins to the editor by setting extraPlugins. (Technically, the FontChoice plugin provides two commands, foreground-color and highlight-color.)

require([
    "dojo/parser",
    "dijit/Editor",
    "dijit/_editor/plugins/FontChoice", // 'fontName','fontSize','formatBlock'
    "dijit/_editor/plugins/TextColor"
]);

<div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="editor2"
        data-dojo-props="extraPlugins:['foreColor','hiliteColor',{name:'dijit/_editor/plugins/FontChoice', command:'fontName', generic:true}],
  onChange:function(){console.log('editor2 onChange handler: ' + arguments[0])}">
  <p>This instance is created with additional toolbar/ plugins</p>
</div>

This example starts from scratch, thus removing some items from the toolbar (as compared to the default), like underline, and adding other features, namely the LinkDialog:

require(["dojo/parser", "dijit/Editor", "dijit/_editor/plugins/LinkDialog"]);

<div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="editor3"
      data-dojo-props="plugins:['bold','italic','|','createLink'],
      onChange:function(){console.log('editor3 onChange handler: ' + arguments[0])}">
  <p>This instance is created with customized toolbar/ plugins</p>
</div>

Builtin Commands

This is a list of the default commands (plugins) supported by the editor as built-in capabilities. They can be specified in the plugins parameter (in addition to actual editor plugins in the editor/plugins directory or other places):

Additional Editor Plugins

There are several additional editor plugins provided by dijit and are listed on the page: dijit._editor.plugins. These plugins add very useful functionality above and beyond the basics of editor, such as setting text color or printing. Please note that several of the plugins actually provide multiple capabilities.

DojoX (Dojo eXtensions) contains even more plugins for improving the capabilities of dijit.Editor. These are functions that were deemed 'less common' requirements and were therefore put in the extensions namespace. Please refer to the dojox.editor.plugins page for more information about them.

Auto-expanding editor

Typically an editor has a constant height, and if there's a lot of content it gets a scrollbar. This is in addition to the main scrollbar for the page.

Editor also has a mode like dijit.form.Textarea where the more a user types, the more the text box expands.

However, that's a bit tricky because if implemented naively the toolbar would eventually scroll off the top of the page.

The AlwaysShowToolbar plugin prevents that. It's used along with setting height="" parameter setting.

require(["dojo/parser", "dijit/Editor", "dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar"]);

    <div data-dojo-type="dijit/Editor" id="editor5"
               data-dojo-props="extraPlugins:['dijit/_editor/plugins/AlwaysShowToolbar']"  height="100px">
        <p>
            This editor is created from a div with AlwaysShowToolbar plugin (do not forget to set height="").
        </p>
</div>

Accessibility (1.0 and later versions)