Implement cursor moving and editing with arrow keys in the textarea widget.

[golbin]

Now, users can move with arrow keys and edit text anywhere on a cursor. And it works well with multi-byte characters but there is a little bug.

And actually It has a performance problem when you copy a large text and if we want fix this, fix "element.parseContent" function.

But I think, it's enough for editing small text and if someone want to edit large text, it's better to use slap-editor.

[chjj]

But I think, it's enough for editing small text and if someone want to edit large text, it's better to use slap-editor.

That's okay, we want a small editor in blessed. So this would be perfect.

@dbkaplun, what do you think?

[dbkaplun]

Hey,

I completely agree that blessed could use some improved text editing. I took a look a cursory look at this patch and it has some bugs:

• Tabs don't work right
• Delete doesn't work right when the cursor is at the beginning of the document
• Maybe this should go into Input? Theoretically speaking

Good job @golbin!

[chjj]

@dbkaplun, yes those first two bugs should be fixed, but I don't think it should go into Input. Anything can be an input (e.g. a Button). It doesn't need cursor movements.

This also needs to be refactored a little bit to match coding style. edit: Actually taking a second look, it's pretty good in that regard, just concatenation or addition always uses the operator at the beginning of the line when line feed separated: a \n+ b instead of a +\n b. Double-quotes are a no-no.

[chjj]

@golbin, have you tested this with all manner of fullUnicode characters? double-width, double-width surrogates, surrogates, and combining chars? That would be the trickiest part. I don't think I ever had it perfect. If you got that working it would be fantastic.

[golbin]

@chjj I've test surrogate and combining functions but it did't works well. So, I just check character width and it works almost cases for CJK. There is a known bug which is during character is combining.

[chjj]

@golbin, @dbkaplun, I think you two should work together on a concensus minimal text editor for Textarea. @dbkaplun has the most experience with editing and @golbin dealt with all the unicode gotchas and made text navigation of his own.

If @dbkaplun rips some of his text navigation code and @golbin adds the unicode/double-width/surrogate/combining/fuck-unicode/etc stuff, I think you guys would make something good.

Would you guys work together on this?

[chjj]

Or maybe @dbkaplun could add a stripped down verson of his Editor element and @golbin adds the unicode stuff?

[golbin]

I'm OK both way. 😄

[KalenAnson]

Would love to have this functionality in textboxes as well so a user can edit a line of text using cursor movements (left and right only though).

[dbkaplun]

Hey, I've been meaning to mention, I've factored out the editor widget from slap here. It features navigation via configurable keybindings as well as mouse support. Hope it's useful!

[KalenAnson]

@dbkaplun This may be exactly what I need. Thanks!

[j-em]

Is this PR still active or the recommended way to get arrow support in textarea is now editor-widget ?

[skerit]

I was planning on using this custom Textarea because editor-widget just pulls in way too many dependencies when you only want some arrow navigation and such.

So I tried using this, but the cursor ends up in the totally wrong place and characters get... scrambled, somehow, while typing.

I looked at the code and found that this was the issue, in _applyCursor:

var cyMax = lpos.yl - lpos.yi + this.iheight;

this.iheight was always 0 for some reason, so the cursor ended up at the top of the screen.
Just changing it to

var cyMax = lpos.yl;

fixed that issue for me. I don't know if it's because I positioned the widget using bottom: 0 or not, but anyway.

[oaknuggins]

Hello @golbin and @skerit,

I found your patches to be very useful. Is it OK if these patches were to be applied on a new "blessed" fork? The rest of the repo would be kept the same.

Thanks a lot!

[golbin]

@oaknuggins I think it works with latest blessed. But it's a little buggy.

[antonmedv]

Awesome work @golbin
Did anyone working on something more powerful but lightweight (not slap's editor-widget)?

[yyjjqq94]

@golbin good work. why lastest blessed desn't merge this pr? no progress on this problem?

[antonmedv]

Blessed is dead for years now. I’m thinking to creating new one from scratch, if I find some time.

[hp4k1h5]

Blessed is dead for years now. I’m thinking to creating new one from scratch, if I find some time.

id be happy to contribute if you do start something new.