RichTextFX provides a text area for JavaFX with API to style ranges of text. It is intended as a base for rich-text editors and code editors with syntax highlighting.
Scroll down to Demos to see it in action.
There is plenty of room for enhancements, e.g. support for paragraph-level styles (#6), placing arbitrary nodes in the text (#87), copy/paste including style information (#17), ... To give me or someone else more incentive to implement these or other features, you can create a bounty.
- Assign arbitrary styles to arbitrary ranges of text.
- Display line numbers or, more generally, any graphic in front of each paragraph. Can be used to show breakpoint toggles on each line of code.
- Positioning a popup window relative to the caret or selection. Useful e.g. to position an autocompletion box.
- Getting the character index under the mouse when the mouse stays still over the text for a specified period of time. Useful for displaying tooltips depending on the word under the mouse.
StyleClassedTextArea lets you assign style classes to ranges of text. You can define the style classes in your stylesheet.
Example.java:
area.setStyleClass(from, to, "red");example.css:
.red { -fx-fill: red; }This renders the text in the range [from, to) in red.
Note that the style classes are assigned to instances of Text, so you can specify any CSS properties applicable to a Text node.
CodeArea is a variant of StyleClassedTextArea that uses a fixed width font by default, making it a convenient base for source code editors. CodeArea is used in the Java Keywords demo below.
InlineCssTextArea lets you specify inline CSS for a range of text.
area.setStyle(from, to, "-fx-font-weight: bold;");Again, you can use any CSS properties applicable to a Text node.
InlineStyleTextArea<S> is a more general version of InlineCssTextArea. In the end, there is still inline CSS assigned to Text nodes, but instead of using the CSS string directly, you use an instance of your custom style representation S and provide a way (function) to convert S to CSS string in InlineStyleTextArea constructor.
class MyStyleInfo {
boolean bold;
boolean italic;
String toCss() {
return "-fx-font-weight: " + (bold ? "bold" : "normal") + ";"
+ "-fx-font-style: " + (italic ? "italic" : "normal") + ";";
}
}
InlineStyleTextArea<MyStyleInfo> area =
new InlineStyleTextArea<>(new MyStyleInfo(), styleInfo -> styleInfo.toCss());The first constructor argument is the default style to use for ranges of text where you don't set the style explicitly. The second constructor argument is the function to convert the custom style representation to CSS.
You then assign an instance of your custom style representation to a range of text.
MyStyleInfo styleInfo = ...;
area.setStyle(from, to, styleInfo);You appreciate the benefits of this approach over InlineCssTextArea when you need to query the style used at a given position in text - you get back an instance of your style representation instead of a CSS string.
MyStyleInfo styleInfo = area.getStyleAt(charIndex);InlineStyleTextArea is used in the Rich-text demo below.
JDK8 is required, because TextFlow, introduced in JavaFX 8.0, is used to render each line. Also, there's a heavy use of lambdas, defender methods and the stream API in the code base.
Download the pre-built "fat" JAR file and run
java -cp richtextfx-demos-fat-0.5.1.jar org.fxmisc.richtext.demo.JavaKeywords
or
java -cp richtextfx-demos-fat-0.5.1.jar org.fxmisc.richtext.demo.JavaKeywordsAsync
gradle JavaKeywords
or
gradle JavaKeywordsAsync
The former computes highlighting on the JavaFX application thread, while the latter computes highlighting on a background thread.
Download the pre-built "fat" JAR file and run
java -cp richtextfx-demos-fat-0.5.1.jar org.fxmisc.richtext.demo.RichText
gradle RichText
When the mouse pauses over the text area, you can get index of the character under the mouse. This allows you to implement, for example, custom tooltips whose content depends on the text under the mouse.
Download the pre-built "fat" JAR file and run
java -cp richtextfx-demos-fat-0.5.1.jar org.fxmisc.richtext.demo.TooltipDemo
gradle TooltipDemo
Current stable release is 0.5.1.
| Group ID | Artifact ID | Version |
|---|---|---|
| org.fxmisc.richtext | richtextfx | 0.5.1 |
dependencies {
compile group: 'org.fxmisc.richtext', name: 'richtextfx', version: '0.5.1'
}libraryDependencies += "org.fxmisc.richtext" % "richtextfx" % "0.5.1"Download the JAR file or the fat JAR file (including dependencies) and place it on your classpath.
Snapshot releases are deployed to Sonatype snapshot repository.
| Group ID | Artifact ID | Version |
|---|---|---|
| org.fxmisc.richtext | richtextfx | 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT |
repositories {
maven {
url 'https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/'
}
}
dependencies {
compile group: 'org.fxmisc.richtext', name: 'richtextfx', version: '1.0.0-SNAPSHOT'
}resolvers += "Sonatype OSS Snapshots" at "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots"
libraryDependencies += "org.fxmisc.richtext" % "richtextfx" % "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"Kappa IDE
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mqtt-spy
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Xanthic
Please, let me know if you use RichTextFX in your project and would like it to be listed here.
Dual-licensed under BSD 2-Clause License and GPLv2 with the Classpath Exception.