slate/docs/concepts/Readme.md

This document explain the core concepts that Slate is built on around. It is helpful to read it through in it's entirety to get a good mental model for how Slate works.

• Statelessness & Immutability
• The Document Model
• The Selection Mode
• Transforms
• Plugins

Statelessness & Immutability

• all the data is immutable, for performance
• changes propagated up through the single onChange handler

The Document Model

• recursive, nested tree
• document, blocks, and inlines implement node interface
• blocks and inlines can be nested to any depth
• blocks contain inlines and text
• inlines contain text
• always a text node at the leaves, for selection handling
• void nodes can't have content, but still have an empty text node

The Selection Model

• selection is always relative to text nodes (is normalized)
• "blocks" always refers to the closest block parent

Transforms

• no updating of document/selection outside of transforms
• wrap blocks wraps close to the text
• wrap inline wraps far from the text

Plugins

• everything is a plugin, even core is one
• the editor's props become the highest-priority plugin