How to get current text selection with tiptap

If you’re using the tiptap editor, it can be difficult to figure out how to get the currently selected (highlighted) text.

To do this, you have to drop down to ProseMirror, the library that tiptap is built on top of. With a given tiptap instance (editor), you can access the internal EditorView from ProseMirror at editor.view.

Therefore we can get the current selection with:

editor.view.state.selection

This returns an instance of the Selection class, which is documented here in ProseMirror’s documentation. You can use all the methods listed in that documentation, and run them on editor.view.state.selection.

For example, to check whether any text is actually currently highlighted in the tiptap editor, you would do this:

const currentSelectionIsEmpty = editor.view.state.selection.empty