A small React hook to turn elements into fully renderable & editable content surfaces, like code editors, using contenteditable (and magic)
useEditable
is a small hook that enables elements to be contenteditable
while still being fully renderable. This is ideal for creating small code editors or prose textareas in just 2kB
!
It aims to allow any element to be editable while still being able to render normal React elements to it — no innerHTML
and having to deal with operating with or rendering to raw HTML, or starting a full editor project from scratch.
Check out the full demo on CodeSandbox with prism-react-renderer
!
First install use-editable
alongside react
:
yarn add use-editable
# or
npm install --save use-editable
You'll then be able to import useEditable
and pass it an HTMLElement
ref and an onChange
handler.
import React, { useState, useRef } from 'react';
import { useEditable } from 'use-editable';
const RainbowCode = () => {
const [code, setCode] = useState('function test() {}\nconsole.log("hello");');
const editorRef = useRef(null);
useEditable(editorRef, setCode);
return (
<div className="App">
<pre
style={{ whiteSpace: 'pre-wrap', fontFamily: 'monospace' }}
ref={editorRef}
>
{code.split(/\r?\n/).map((content, i, arr) => (
<React.Fragment key={i}>
<span style={{ color: `hsl(${((i % 20) * 17) | 0}, 80%, 50%)` }}>
{content}
</span>
{i < arr.length - 1 ? '\n' : null}
</React.Fragment>
))}
</pre>
</div>
);
};
And just like that we've hooked up useEditable
to our editorRef
, which points to the <pre>
element that is being rendered, and to setCode
which drives our state containing some code.
This library has been tested against and should work properly using:
- Chrome
- Safari
- iOS Safari
- Firefox
There are known issues in IE 11 due to the MutationObserver
method being unable to
readd text nodes that have been removed via the contenteditable
.
Traditionally, there have been three options when choosing editing surfaces in React. Either one
could go for a large project like ProseMirror / CodeMirror or similar which take control over much
of the editing and rendering events and are hence rather opinionated, or it's possible to just
use contenteditable
and render to raw HTML that is replaced in the element's content, or lastly one
could combine a textarea
with an overlapping div
that renders stylised content.
All three options don't allow much customisation in terms of what actually gets rendered or put unreasonable restrictions on how easy it is to render and manage an editable's content.
So what makes rendering to a contenteditable
element so hard?
Typically this is tough because they edit the DOM directly. This causes most rendering libraries, like
React and Preact to be confused, since their underlying Virtual DOMs don't match up with the actual
DOM structure anymore. To prevent this issue use-editable
creates a MutationObserver
, which watches
over all changes that are made to the contenteditable
element. Before it reports these changes to
React it first rolls back all changes to the DOM so that React sees what it expects.
Furthermore it also preserves the current position of the caret, the selection, and restores it once
React has updated the DOM itself. This is a rather common technique for contenteditable
editors, but
the MutationObserver
addition is what enables use-editable
to let another view library update the element's
content.
Currently either the rendered elements' text content has to eventually exactly match the code input,
or your implementation must be able to convert the rendered text content back into what you're using
as state. This is a limitation of how contenteditable
's work, since they'll only capture the actual
DOM content. Since use-editable
doesn't aim to be a full component that manages the render cycle, it
doesn't have to keep any extra state, but will only pass the DOM's text back to the onChange
callback.
Using the onChange
callback you'll also receive a Position
object describing the cursor position,
the current line number, and the line's contents up until the cursor, which is useful for auto-suggestions,
which could then be applied with the update
function that useEditable
returns to update the cursor
position.
The first argument is elementRef
and accepts a ref object of type RefObject<HTMLElement>
which
points to the element that should become editable. This ref is allowed to be null
or change during
the runtime of the hook. As long as the changes of the ref are triggered by React, everything should
behave as expected.
The second argument is onChange
and accepts a callback of type (text: string, pos: Position) => void
that's called whenever the content of the contenteditable
changes. This needs to be set up so that
it'll trigger a rerender of the element's contents.
The text
that onChange
receives is just the textual representation of the element's contents, while the
Position
it receives contains the current position of the cursor, the line number (zero-indexed), and
the content of the current line up until the cursor, which is useful for autosuggestions.
The third argument is an optional options
object. This accepts currently two options to change
the editing behavior of the hook:
- The
disabled
option disables editing on the editable by removing thecontentEditable
attribute from it again. - The
indentation
option may be a number of displayed spaces for indentation. This also enables the improvedTab
key behavior which will indent the current line or dedent the current line when shift is held (Be aware that this will make the editor act as a focus trap!)
Additionally the useEditable
hook returns a function that may be used to update the content while
adjusting the next render's cursor position. This is a convenience method that can come in handy for
adding auto-suggested content in combination with a Position
's current line contents for instance.
react-live
, which I've worked on had one of the early tinycontenteditable
editors. (But with raw HTML updates)react-simple-code-editor
was the first (?) library to use a split textarea and rendering surface implementation, which presented what a nice editing API should look like.codejar
contains the best tricks to manage selections, although it lacks some Firefox workarounds. It also uses raw HTML highlighting / updating.codemirror.next
is an invaluable source to see different techniques when handling text input and DOM update tricks.