Canvas Line Editor is my (ongoing) attempt at creating a plaintext editing interface for an IDE I'm building with Electron.js.
Initially, when working on the interface for the aforementioned IDE, I used a single
textarea extending custom element for the text editing section. I knew this would be
an inefficient solution for large files (like package-lock.json), but I figured I could
use it as a placeholder that I could build a framework of functionality around, and
swap it out later for something better.
The first alternative I thought of was using a contenteditable element for each line
of text in a file, but soon realised that this drastically impeded multi-line cursor
selections.
At the moment, I'm working on a similar solution that involves using a canvas extending
custom element for each line of text, and that's what you see here!
Simply clone the repo, cd into the repo, and run npm install.
To fire it up, run npm run dev in the repo's root directory.