rich-textarea

A small customizable textarea for React to colorize, highlight, decorate texts, offer autocomplete and much more.

Demo

https://inokawa.github.io/rich-textarea/

Features

Styleable texts: Not just highlighting texts like similar libraries, this library also supports colorizing, decorating and more. Regex or any tokenizers can be used.
Easy to interact with events: You can get caret position and can catch some mouse events on texts, which are useful to display something reflects user actions.
Compatible with textarea: Except added features, this library is designed to behave as native textarea as much as possible. If not worked properly, please report it in an issue or PR.
IME composition handling: IME related events have some cross browser problems. This library handles them for easy to use.
Lightweight: Trying to support many usecases but also keep bundle size small. Currently about 3kB (gzipped).

Motivation

Sometimes we need customized text editor in web. However creating it with raw contenteditable is so hard to do properly and editor frameworks are usually too heavy... Maybe you really need is just a textarea with highlighting and some hovered menus, but native textarea and many of textarea libraries are far from it because of the limited customizability. This library is aiming to solve the problem.

Install

npm install rich-textarea

Requirements

react >= 16.14

Usage

You can create your own render function

import { useState } from "react";
import { RichTextarea } from "rich-textarea";

export const App = () => {
  const [text, setText] = useState("Lorem ipsum");

  return (
    <RichTextarea
      value={text}
      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
      onChange={(e) => setText(e.target.value)}
    >
      {(v) => {
        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
            {t}
          </span>
        ));
      }}
    </RichTextarea>
  );
};

or you can use helper for regex.

import { useState } from "react";
import { RichTextarea, createRegexRenderer } from "rich-textarea";

const renderer = createRegexRenderer([
  [/[A-Z][a-z]+/g, { borderRadius: "3px", backgroundColor: "#d0bfff" }],
]);

export const App = () => {
  const [text, setText] = useState("Lorem ipsum");

  return (
    <RichTextarea
      value={text}
      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
      onChange={(e) => setText(e.target.value)}
    >
      {renderer}
    </RichTextarea>
  );
};

And see examples for more usages.

Props

For other props not mentioned below will be passed to textarea.

Name	Type	Default	Description
value	`string`	required	Same as textarea but only string
defaultValue	-	-	Omitted for simplicity of logic
children	`(value: string) => React.ReactNode`	`undefined`	This function should return ReactNodes which texts are positioned the same as textarea (see examples for detailed usage). Currently limited event handlers will work for the nodes (`onClick`, `onMouseOver`, `onMouseOut`, `onMouseMove`, `onMouseDown` and `onMouseUp`)
autoHeight	`boolean`	`undefined`	If true, textarea height is automatically resized and height of style prop does not work. Set `maxHeight` to style prop if you need limit.
onSelectionChange	`(pos: CaretPosition, value: string) => void`	`undefined`	Called when selection in textarea changes. It gives position of caret at the time, which is useful to position menu.

Methods

Name	Type	Description
ref	`React.RefObject<HTMLTextAreaElement>`	Ref of textarea
selectionStart	`number`	Same as textarea but has handling of composition event
selectionEnd	`number`	Same as textarea but has handling of composition event
focus		Same as textarea
blur		Same as textarea
select		Same as textarea
setSelectionRange		Same as textarea
setRangeText		Same as textarea but has fallback to `document.execCommand("insertText")`

Makaron131/rich-textarea