Building a React-friendly rich text editing library from scratch is such an engaging challenge that Facebook has already done it twice. At the New York Times, we took a different approach: relying heavily on React primitives to build a React adaptor for ProseMirror, an existing feature-rich, battle-tested library for collaborative rich text editing. The result, @nytimes/react-prosemirror, focuses on making it safe (and, dare we say, fun?) to build React applications with ProseMirror-powered rich text fields. ProseMirror and React have fundamentally different approaches to DOM ownership, state management, and rendering. In this technical talk, we’ll explore how we navigated these differing philosophies and used nearly all React has to offer to build a single coherent library.