KindEditor is a free web based, server side powered, WYSIWYG HTML editor, which you can install to your website and allow either your guests to create HTML documents or you can use it yourself as your own personal web based graphical HTML editor. It comes with a full featured toolbar for quickly inserting images, changing fonts, modifying text formatting, and everything else that you need for creating HTML documents.
HTML editor that you get can be seen on the image down below. It’s very simple with a two row toolbar at the top and a text editing area down below where you can of course, make changes to the HTML documents. As you can see, there are a lot of different buttons that you can click and each of them makes it easier for you to insert content in the HTML document or to edit it in some other way.
This web based WYSIWYG HTML editor runs entirely inside the web browser, and requires to run a web server in order to use. It can either be a local web server or one that you’ve paid with a hosting company somewhere.
Key features of KindEditor are:
- Free and simple to setup: embed editor via a simple code snippet copy.
- Lightweight: less than 50KB in size and has a very low server usage.
- Cross browser compatible: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.
- Comes with a very advanced toolbox: text formatting, fonts, images, etc.
- Web based: installs on a web server and runs entirely from a browser.
Similar software: Kompozer.
There are some requirements that your server will need to have in order to run this script. It will have to support ASP.NET and PHP. KindEditor is basically a script that you can install to your website, it’s not a standard application. Here’s a few pointers to help you get started.
How to use this Free web based WYSIWYG HTML editor
Complete installation is a bit tricky, at least when it comes to setting up a web server, if you don’t have one running, so it’s best that you open up the KindEditor homepage and read about installation there.
Creating HTML documents with KindEditor is very simple, as you can see from the screenshot above. You can just type in text, format it using the toolbar at the top, and also insert images, just like you would in Word for example.
All the way in the top left corner you can click on the switcher which switches between HTML syntax and the WYSIWYG HTML editor. Once we clicked there, instead of seeing how our document looks like, we now see the HTML behind it. This is for all those interested in editing using HTML and then just using KindEditor WYSIWYG functionality for previews.
Conclusion
KindEditor might not be the easiest way how to setup a free WYSIWYG HTML editor, but if you need such an editor on your website that can be easily embedded using a code snippet, then this is the thing you need. It’s very light on server but at the same time offers a lot of interesting features. Try it and see how it goes.
