Is Plate really a smart choice for someone who has no idea of Slate?

[Midhun-Carousell]

Hi,
I am trying to build a Rich text editor for my app and Slate and Plate came in to my attention. I am quite new to react and typescript ecosystem and I am running in to troubles with both Slate and Plate.
I started with Slate initially and tried understanding the basics of building an editor, but I found the documents to be be too overwhelming for a newbie and it really became obvious that unless I put in a lot of hours, I cannot build a text editor using Slate.

I joined the Slate Slack channel and enquired about any good beginner friendly docs to get started with Slate, but got introduced to Plate instead, which I understand is a wrapper around Slate. I have been trying to set up an editor using Plate for couple of days now, and unfortunately it has also been nothing but a painful ride(I enjoy spending time on it but I am running short of time). I know If building an editor is all I had to do, I could have done it but I find Plate also extremely complex to use, especially since the docs refer to Slate and Slate props, a lot.

My requirements are pretty simple as I need a rich text editor for a send email functionality with

1. A toolbar with formatting options(BIU headers and links) - I could figure this out looking at the code thankfully.
2. Load HTML itself in to the editor from an api- > I need to deserialise but I am not able to understand the examples in the doc or find good ones which could help me.
3. Generate HTML from the editor rather than use the JSON data as I already have existing apis to provide this data to. I figured out how to get this done with serializeHTML method from Plate, but it threw a lot of console errors and all the html tags ended up with some classes prefixed with slate.

React-RTE and React Quill seemed pretty straightforward to use, but I didnt want to use them as they are becoming obsolete/ have not yet started supporting React 18.

I have been trying to find some working code in code sandboxes or try to understand the code from the playground but I see most of them are a code dump of anything and everything in Plate, without any comments on what they do.

Mine is a nextjs based app and with serialise, I get this error in huge numbers every time I edit the content of my editor:
index.js:1350 Warning: useLayoutEffect does nothing on the server, because its effect cannot be encoded into the server renderer's output format. This will lead to a mismatch between the initial, non-hydrated UI and the intended UI. To avoid this, useLayoutEffect should only be used in components that render exclusively on the client. See https://reactjs.org/link/uselayouteffect-ssr for common fixes. at Slate (http://localhost:3001/static/js/vendors~main.chunk.js:213191:5)

Apologies for the long rant, I am just frustrated that I am not able to consume Plate to build an awesome RTE as I wanted to.
Do any of you have any docs or code repos on plate, which you think might be helpful to a beginner like me?

[zbeyens]

Slate is the most flexible but also the most complex editor out there. Plate is trying to make it more beginner-friendly, but there is still many advanced logic will need advanced Slate, TS and React notions. Serialization is one of them. I plan to do screen-casting later this year to fill the gaps.

I think these are more beginner friendly at the moment: tiptap, remirror

As for the docs/repos: I'm in the middle of rewriting these using Sandpack, should be ready for this week.

[Midhun-Carousell]

Thank you for responding to my queries @zbeyens
I am really looking forward to the the screen cast and the new docs.