Fire an event on caret position change

[SebastianZ]

For a syntax highlighter I'd like to get the current caret position while pressing keys on the keyboard.

I tried to use the keydown event and the legacy keypress event, but they are fired continuously before the caret position changes. And the keyup event is only fired once after the key is released. Besides that there is also the input event, though that's just fired on text input and not when the text cursor changes.

So, what is missing is an event that is either

1. fired continuously while a key is pressed like input but even when no input happens like keydown, or
2. fired everytime right after the caret position changed.

I slightly prefer the second solution, because it allows to get the caret position even on other input types like mouse events.

Sebastian

[garykac]

This feature request is unlikely to go forward as it doesn't appear to be broadly useful, and there is active pushback to adding any new events.

Since I have not heard of any other requests for this, my recommendation would be to use the workaround suggested on the stackoverflow page you link to.

Having said that, since this seems editing (contenteditable) related, you might want to see if there is any interest from other developers of text editors.
@johanneswilm (editing spec editor), do you have any comments on this?

[dziesig]

Well, even though it is almost two years since SebastianZ requested this event, I, too, could really use such an event. Since it appears that there are only two users in the world interested in this, it is off to the workaround I go. ;)

[SebastianZ]

@dziesig wrote:

... it is off to the workaround I go.

Which workaround is that?

Sebastian

[rniwa]

Why not listen for selectionchange event? FWIW, this is an issue which should be tracked by https://github.com/w3c/selection-api.

[SebastianZ]

Looks like the selectionchange event serves my use case. Thank you for pointing that out, @rniwa! I didn't know about that event.

Sebastian