I would like a callback function to be executed each time the caret or selection moves in the text area.
Anybody knows how to do that?
Edit: I know how to retrieve the carret position. I'm interested in how to watch for the change. With my current knowledge i would test carret position on each keyup / mousemouve / mouseup. Is there a smarter (and more performant) way to do it. Are there event that may change the carret position that i did not think about ?
There's a DOM event onSelect that you can use, but it will only pick up caret movements when that movement affects the selection. Here's a JSBin with a demo:
http://jsbin.com/eyaril/4/edit
Just select text in the box and view the output in firebug.
In the end I finally found after exploring each of possible solutions that there is no performant way to do that for large amounts of text.
I have no other solution than waiting for my web application to meet the technical requirements to use a modern text area replacement library (= not depending of ie quirks mode).
Related
First time posting here. I'm working on a mouse-and-keyboard disability device for a course bioengineering course and I've got a feature that I've got no clue how to begin implementing. Basically, I want to be able to "select" which are the K "focus targets" nearest to the cursor, draw boxes around them/highlight them (much like Chrome or Windows does) and, after deciding which "target" I want to select, focus/click that one. The goal is to use eye-tracking software to move a cursor and then blink/contract a muscle to see which are the closest targets (that way you can click on really tiny stuff which would be hard to select otherwise).
Not sure if "focus target" is the right word, I mean "what gets selected next" after you press Tab. If there's some "universal" way of doing this across apps that'd be great, but either a browser-only or Windows-only way would be great. The only workaround idea I've had so far is to press Tab a bunch of times, see what changes appear on screen, use OpenCV to detect on-screen changes and then see which are closest to the cursor, but that means the screen would spaz out and also wouldn't work if there's any sort of animation on the screen.
Thanks in advance!
You can get element by your cursor and then search the dom tree for input, and then you can use javascript to focus on that input
I am aware that in most browsers (newest generation), the mouse cursor gets hidden when you type in any key like 'A' or Space. This is to let the user see what he types in.
The cursor gets back visible as soon as you move the mouse for a pixel.
Now here comes the problem -- This happens everywhere in a browser, even when I've focused a non-input element like a div or the such. I do, however, not want the browser to hide my cursor after the user has pressed a key as I'm using keys as shortcuts.
So the question is -- is there any way or trick or anything to prevent this from happening and/or letting the cursor auto-appear again after key-up?
I've tried various "hacks" over the web like invisible divs etc. but everything without success.
EDIT: As questioned, I am experiencing this behavior on every Browser (Chrome latest, Firefox latest, Safari latest) on latest MAC-OS-X.
This is not browser behavior but operating system behavior, and specifically Mac behavior. The cursor will not only hide if you type in the browser, but in any application on your Mac.
This means that the browser has no knowledge or control over the cursor, because it's hidden from a higher level. You can change the cursor with CSS or JavaScript for example, but it still won't show until you move it. You can't actually move the cursor using JavaScript, but even if you could I still doubt it'd help because the operating system didn't receive a signal of the cursor moving.
Also refer to this question on apple.stackexchange.com:
How do I disable hiding of the mouse pointer while typing text?
I just thought of a possible solution to this, but it's going to be really hard to do this in a way that is not annoying the user:
Whenever the cursor moves, save it's position
When the document observes a keyup, show an image of a cursor at the exact coordinates of where the actual cursor was seen last (it's still there, but hidden)
When the actual cursor moves again, hide the image (actually, merge this function with 1.)
The problem here is going to be knowing what cursor image to show. You would first have to detect if the user is on a Mac (or another OS that hides the cursor), but also what cursor should be shown depending on what you're hovering. It means that for every element you're hovering you would also have to detect which cursor is being shown and show an image of the same cursor.
You can cover the basics/defaults by adding some css rules that cover hovering of links and inputs (pointer and text respectively), but what if the user uses custom cursors defined in his OS?
I haven't tried any code yet, this is just a concept that should work in theory so let me know if you need more help with it, but honestly I'd advise against trying to accomplish this. It's going to bring more trouble than it solves, imo.
-edit-
Here's a Proof of Concept: http://jsfiddle.net/4rKMx/2/
I am aware that in most browsers (newest generation), the mouse cursor gets hidden when you type in any key like 'A' or Space. This is to let the user see what he types in.
The cursor gets back visible as soon as you move the mouse for a pixel.
Now here comes the problem -- This happens everywhere in a browser, even when I've focused a non-input element like a div or the such. I do, however, not want the browser to hide my cursor after the user has pressed a key as I'm using keys as shortcuts.
So the question is -- is there any way or trick or anything to prevent this from happening and/or letting the cursor auto-appear again after key-up?
I've tried various "hacks" over the web like invisible divs etc. but everything without success.
EDIT: As questioned, I am experiencing this behavior on every Browser (Chrome latest, Firefox latest, Safari latest) on latest MAC-OS-X.
This is not browser behavior but operating system behavior, and specifically Mac behavior. The cursor will not only hide if you type in the browser, but in any application on your Mac.
This means that the browser has no knowledge or control over the cursor, because it's hidden from a higher level. You can change the cursor with CSS or JavaScript for example, but it still won't show until you move it. You can't actually move the cursor using JavaScript, but even if you could I still doubt it'd help because the operating system didn't receive a signal of the cursor moving.
Also refer to this question on apple.stackexchange.com:
How do I disable hiding of the mouse pointer while typing text?
I just thought of a possible solution to this, but it's going to be really hard to do this in a way that is not annoying the user:
Whenever the cursor moves, save it's position
When the document observes a keyup, show an image of a cursor at the exact coordinates of where the actual cursor was seen last (it's still there, but hidden)
When the actual cursor moves again, hide the image (actually, merge this function with 1.)
The problem here is going to be knowing what cursor image to show. You would first have to detect if the user is on a Mac (or another OS that hides the cursor), but also what cursor should be shown depending on what you're hovering. It means that for every element you're hovering you would also have to detect which cursor is being shown and show an image of the same cursor.
You can cover the basics/defaults by adding some css rules that cover hovering of links and inputs (pointer and text respectively), but what if the user uses custom cursors defined in his OS?
I haven't tried any code yet, this is just a concept that should work in theory so let me know if you need more help with it, but honestly I'd advise against trying to accomplish this. It's going to bring more trouble than it solves, imo.
-edit-
Here's a Proof of Concept: http://jsfiddle.net/4rKMx/2/
Is it possible to get the word under the mouse cursor in a <textarea>?
I have seen this question asked many times regarding text in <p> tags or similar html output tags, such as here, but the <span> based solution doesn't work with a <textarea>, for obvious reasons.
One approach I have considered is to fire a jQuery click() event to place the cursor and then use something like Tim Down's answere here to get the current word based on the cursor location. But a click() event doesn't seem to place the cursor at all.
So that answer would be sufficient as well. How do I mimic a click event within a <textarea> so as to place the cursor at the current mouse position?
You could have a look at HTML5 CONTENT EDITABLE, this would help you to merge the first link you gave in your question and get your solution
I need to determine the width and height of the current mouse cursor used on our webpage.
I need to show a div right under the cursor, and possibly to the right of it.
So I need to determine the offsets of my div from the exact pointer location, so the cursor do not cover up the div.
The mechanism will be used in intranet system, so it can be firefox-only solution.
Unfortunatelly some people here use weird cursors, anyway, big ones, so I cannot just hardcode eg, 16px right, 16px top offsets. Anyway, I don't want if I don't have to.
Thanks for your help.
You can't do it. Anyone can set their cursor to any arbitrary garbage, and there's no API for asking from the browser.
I don't think this it is possible to determine any more than the cursor center within the browser. It surely can be done using a custom-made Firefox extension but I doubt there are any around for this specific task.
While size is not possible, there are jQuery addons like SimpleTip and qTip that let you create fixed-position tool tips that don't close until something happens (like the user clicks on it). The content of the tool tips can be wrapped in divs.