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

1npm 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

1import { useState } from "react";
2import { RichTextarea } from "rich-textarea";
3
4export const App = () => {
5  const [text, setText] = useState("Lorem ipsum");
6
7  return (
8    <RichTextarea
9      value={text}
10      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
11      onChange={(e) => setText(e.target.value)}
12    >
13      {(v) => {
14        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
15          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
16            {t}
17          </span>
18        ));
19      }}
20    </RichTextarea>
21  );
22};

Uncontrolled

1import { RichTextarea } from "rich-textarea";
2
3export const App = () => {
4  return (
5    <RichTextarea
6      defaultValue="Lorem ipsum"
7      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
8    >
9      {(v) => {
10        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
11          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
12            {t}
13          </span>
14        ));
15      }}
16    </RichTextarea>
17  );
18};

Regex helper

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

1import { useState } from "react";
2import { RichTextarea, createRegexRenderer } from "rich-textarea";
3
4const renderer = createRegexRenderer([
5  [/[A-Z][a-z]+/g, { borderRadius: "3px", backgroundColor: "#d0bfff" }],
6]);
7
8export const App = () => {
9  const [text, setText] = useState("Lorem ipsum");
10
11  return (
12    <RichTextarea
13      value={text}
14      style={{ width: "600px", height: "400px" }}
15      onChange={(e) => setText(e.target.value)}
16    >
17      {renderer}
18    </RichTextarea>
19  );
20};

Next.js Server Actions

1// _components/Textarea.tsx
2"use client";
3import { RichTextarea, RichTextareaProps } from "rich-textarea";
4
5export const Textarea = (
6  props: Omit<RichTextareaProps, "children" | "ref">
7) => {
8  return (
9    <RichTextarea {...props}>
10      {(v) => {
11        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
12          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
13            {t}
14          </span>
15        ));
16      }}
17    </RichTextarea>
18  );
19};
20
21// page.tsx in App Router of Next.js
22import { Textarea } from "../_components/Textarea";
23
24async function hello(formData: FormData) {
25  "use server";
26  console.log(formData.get("hello"));
27}
28
29export default () => {
30  return (
31    <div>
32      <div>this is server!</div>
33      <form action={hello}>
34        <Textarea defaultValue="Lorem ipsum" name="hello" />
35        <button type="submit">submit</button>
36      </form>
37    </div>
38  );
39};

Remix action

1import type { ActionFunction } from "@remix-run/node";
2import { Form } from "@remix-run/react";
3import { RichTextarea, RichTextareaProps } from "rich-textarea";
4
5const Textarea = (props: Omit<RichTextareaProps, "children" | "ref">) => {
6  return (
7    <RichTextarea {...props}>
8      {(v) => {
9        return v.split("").map((t, i) => (
10          <span key={i} style={{ color: i % 2 === 0 ? "red" : undefined }}>
11            {t}
12          </span>
13        ));
14      }}
15    </RichTextarea>
16  );
17};
18
19export const action: ActionFunction = async ({ request }) => {
20  console.log((await request.formData()).get("hello"));
21};
22
23export default () => {
24  return (
25    <Form method="post">
26      <Textarea defaultValue="Lorem ipsum" name="hello" />
27      <button type="submit">submit</button>
28    </Form>
29  );
30};

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.