rich-textarea

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

[!NOTE]
You may also like https://github.com/inokawa/edix

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.
• Out of the box integration: Works as both controlled and uncontrolled. Supports formik, react-hook-form, @tanstack/react-form and more. Supports SSR. Supports form with Server Actions in Next.js and action in Remix.
• 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 ~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

If you use ESM and webpack 5, use react >= 18 to avoid Can’t resolve react/jsx-runtime error.

Usage

Controlled

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>
  );
};

Uncontrolled

import { RichTextarea } from "rich-textarea";

export const App = () => {
  return (
    <RichTextarea
      defaultValue="Lorem ipsum"
      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
    >
      {(v) => {
        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
            {t}
          </span>
        ));
      }}
    </RichTextarea>
  );
};

Regex helper

You can use helper for regex if you don’t want to create your own render function.

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>
  );
};

Next.js Server Actions

// _components/Textarea.tsx
"use client";
import { RichTextarea, RichTextareaProps } from "rich-textarea";

export const Textarea = (
  props: Omit<RichTextareaProps, "children" | "ref">
) => {
  return (
    <RichTextarea {...props}>
      {(v) => {
        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
            {t}
          </span>
        ));
      }}
    </RichTextarea>
  );
};

// page.tsx in App Router of Next.js
import { Textarea } from "../_components/Textarea";

async function hello(formData: FormData) {
  "use server";
  console.log(formData.get("hello"));
}

export default () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <div>this is server!</div>
      <form action={hello}>
        <Textarea defaultValue="Lorem ipsum" name="hello" />
        <button type="submit">submit</button>
      </form>
    </div>
  );
};

Remix action

import type { ActionFunction } from "@remix-run/node";
import { Form } from "@remix-run/react";
import { RichTextarea, RichTextareaProps } from "rich-textarea";

const Textarea = (props: Omit<RichTextareaProps, "children" | "ref">) => {
  return (
    <RichTextarea {...props}>
      {(v) => {
        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
            {t}
          </span>
        ));
      }}
    </RichTextarea>
  );
};

export const action: ActionFunction = async ({ request }) => {
  console.log((await request.formData()).get("hello"));
};

export default () => {
  return (
    <Form method="post">
      <Textarea defaultValue="Lorem ipsum" name="hello" />
      <button type="submit">submit</button>
    </Form>
  );
};

Documentation

• API reference
• Examples for more usages

Contribute

All contributions are welcome.
If you find a problem, feel free to create an issue or a PR.

Making a Pull Request

1. Fork this repo.
2. Run npm install.
3. Commit your fix.
4. Make a PR and confirm all the CI checks passed.