// the find
steven-tey/novel
Notion-style WYSIWYG editor with AI-powered autocompletion.
Novel is a Tiptap-based rich text editor that mimics Notion's slash-command UX and adds AI text generation via the Vercel AI SDK. It ships as both a full Next.js demo app and a headless React package you can drop into your own project. Target audience is developers building document editors or note-taking apps who want a Notion-like experience without building from scratch.
The headless package separation is the right call — you get the editor primitives without being locked into the demo app's styling or routing. Tiptap as the foundation means you inherit a mature ProseMirror ecosystem and can add extensions without forking Novel itself. The slash-command and bubble menu implementations are genuinely clean and save real time compared to wiring those up manually in Tiptap. Community-maintained Svelte and Vue ports exist, which reduces the React-only risk for teams on other frameworks.
Last push was January 2025 and the docs are explicitly marked WIP — the project looks like it's coasting. The AI integration is hardcoded to OpenAI via the Vercel AI SDK, so swapping providers requires forking the API route; there's no provider abstraction. The headless package CHANGELOG shows infrequent releases and the package itself has no test suite, which is a real maintenance signal for anything you'd ship to production. Image uploads require Vercel Blob, making the storage layer a Vercel-specific dependency that's awkward to replace.