AmberRack 0.1.0

This diff represents the content of publicly available package versions that have been released to one of the supported registries. The information contained in this diff is provided for informational purposes only and reflects changes between package versions as they appear in their respective public registries.
Files changed (198) hide show
  1. data/.gitignore +74 -0
  2. data/.rvmrc +4 -0
  3. data/Gemfile +2 -0
  4. data/Gemfile.lock +62 -0
  5. data/README.md +17 -0
  6. data/Rakefile +24 -0
  7. data/amber-rack.gemspec +33 -0
  8. data/app/amber_app.rb +35 -0
  9. data/app/javascripts/Benchfib.deploy.js +159 -0
  10. data/app/javascripts/Benchfib.js +159 -0
  11. data/app/javascripts/Canvas.deploy.js +1464 -0
  12. data/app/javascripts/Canvas.js +1464 -0
  13. data/app/javascripts/Compiler.deploy.js +1587 -0
  14. data/app/javascripts/Compiler.js +1587 -0
  15. data/app/javascripts/Examples.deploy.js +800 -0
  16. data/app/javascripts/Examples.js +800 -0
  17. data/app/javascripts/IDE.deploy.js +3457 -0
  18. data/app/javascripts/IDE.js +3457 -0
  19. data/app/javascripts/IDE.js.bak +3420 -0
  20. data/app/javascripts/JQuery.deploy.js +898 -0
  21. data/app/javascripts/JQuery.js +898 -0
  22. data/app/javascripts/Kernel.deploy.js +6761 -0
  23. data/app/javascripts/Kernel.js +6761 -0
  24. data/app/javascripts/Parser.deploy.js +1655 -0
  25. data/app/javascripts/Parser.js +1655 -0
  26. data/app/javascripts/Raphael-Core.js +0 -0
  27. data/app/javascripts/Raphael-Graph.js +0 -0
  28. data/app/javascripts/SUnit.deploy.js +1059 -0
  29. data/app/javascripts/SUnit.js +1059 -0
  30. data/app/javascripts/application.js +2 -0
  31. data/app/javascripts/boot.js +466 -0
  32. data/app/javascripts/init.js +2 -0
  33. data/app/javascripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js +167 -0
  34. data/app/javascripts/jquery-ui-1.8.9.custom.min.js +781 -0
  35. data/app/javascripts/jquery.textarea.js +267 -0
  36. data/app/javascripts/jtalk.js +78 -0
  37. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/LICENSE +19 -0
  38. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/README.md +6 -0
  39. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/compress.html +92 -0
  40. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/css/baboon.png +0 -0
  41. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/css/baboon_vector.svg +153 -0
  42. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/css/docs.css +154 -0
  43. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/activeline.html +72 -0
  44. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/changemode.html +51 -0
  45. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/complete.html +79 -0
  46. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/complete.js +151 -0
  47. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/fullscreen.html +158 -0
  48. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/marker.html +53 -0
  49. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/mustache.html +57 -0
  50. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/preview.html +75 -0
  51. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/resize.html +44 -0
  52. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/runmode.html +50 -0
  53. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/search.html +106 -0
  54. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/demo/theme.html +53 -0
  55. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/index.html +239 -0
  56. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/internals.html +389 -0
  57. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/lib/codemirror.css +67 -0
  58. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/lib/codemirror.js +2144 -0
  59. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/lib/overlay.js +51 -0
  60. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/lib/runmode.js +27 -0
  61. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/manual.html +854 -0
  62. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/clike/clike.js +247 -0
  63. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/clike/index.html +102 -0
  64. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/css/css.js +124 -0
  65. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/css/index.html +56 -0
  66. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/diff/diff.css +3 -0
  67. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/diff/diff.js +13 -0
  68. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/diff/index.html +99 -0
  69. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/haskell/haskell.js +242 -0
  70. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/haskell/index.html +60 -0
  71. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/htmlmixed/htmlmixed.js +79 -0
  72. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/htmlmixed/index.html +52 -0
  73. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/javascript/index.html +78 -0
  74. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/javascript/javascript.js +348 -0
  75. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/lua/index.html +72 -0
  76. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/lua/lua.js +138 -0
  77. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/php/index.html +49 -0
  78. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/php/php.js +110 -0
  79. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/plsql/index.html +63 -0
  80. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/plsql/plsql.js +217 -0
  81. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/python/LICENSE.txt +21 -0
  82. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/python/index.html +123 -0
  83. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/python/python.js +321 -0
  84. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/rst/index.html +526 -0
  85. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/rst/rst.css +75 -0
  86. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/rst/rst.js +333 -0
  87. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/scheme/index.html +65 -0
  88. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/scheme/scheme.js +181 -0
  89. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/smalltalk/index.html +56 -0
  90. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/smalltalk/smalltalk.js +134 -0
  91. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/sparql/index.html +41 -0
  92. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/sparql/sparql.js +143 -0
  93. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/stex/index.html +96 -0
  94. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/stex/stex.js +167 -0
  95. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/xml/index.html +42 -0
  96. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/xml/xml.js +231 -0
  97. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/yaml/index.html +68 -0
  98. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/mode/yaml/yaml.js +95 -0
  99. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/oldrelease.html +178 -0
  100. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/test/index.html +29 -0
  101. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/test/test.js +249 -0
  102. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/theme/default.css +18 -0
  103. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/theme/elegant.css +9 -0
  104. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/theme/jtalk.css +21 -0
  105. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/theme/neat.css +8 -0
  106. data/app/javascripts/lib/CodeMirror/theme/night.css +20 -0
  107. data/app/javascripts/lib/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js +167 -0
  108. data/app/javascripts/lib/jQuery/jquery-ui-1.8.9.custom.min.js +781 -0
  109. data/app/javascripts/lib/jQuery/jquery.textarea.js +267 -0
  110. data/app/smalltalk/Canvas.st +481 -0
  111. data/app/smalltalk/IDE.st +1752 -0
  112. data/config.ru +2 -0
  113. data/lib/amber-rack.rb +4 -0
  114. data/lib/amber-rack/version.rb +3 -0
  115. data/public/CodeMirror/LICENSE +19 -0
  116. data/public/CodeMirror/README.md +6 -0
  117. data/public/CodeMirror/compress.html +92 -0
  118. data/public/CodeMirror/css/baboon.png +0 -0
  119. data/public/CodeMirror/css/baboon_vector.svg +153 -0
  120. data/public/CodeMirror/css/docs.css +154 -0
  121. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/activeline.html +72 -0
  122. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/changemode.html +51 -0
  123. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/complete.html +79 -0
  124. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/complete.js +151 -0
  125. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/fullscreen.html +158 -0
  126. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/marker.html +53 -0
  127. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/mustache.html +57 -0
  128. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/preview.html +75 -0
  129. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/resize.html +44 -0
  130. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/runmode.html +50 -0
  131. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/search.html +106 -0
  132. data/public/CodeMirror/demo/theme.html +53 -0
  133. data/public/CodeMirror/index.html +239 -0
  134. data/public/CodeMirror/internals.html +389 -0
  135. data/public/CodeMirror/lib/codemirror.css +67 -0
  136. data/public/CodeMirror/lib/codemirror.js +2144 -0
  137. data/public/CodeMirror/lib/overlay.js +51 -0
  138. data/public/CodeMirror/lib/runmode.js +27 -0
  139. data/public/CodeMirror/manual.html +854 -0
  140. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/clike/clike.js +247 -0
  141. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/clike/index.html +102 -0
  142. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/css/css.js +124 -0
  143. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/css/index.html +56 -0
  144. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/diff/diff.css +3 -0
  145. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/diff/diff.js +13 -0
  146. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/diff/index.html +99 -0
  147. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/haskell/haskell.js +242 -0
  148. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/haskell/index.html +60 -0
  149. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/htmlmixed/htmlmixed.js +79 -0
  150. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/htmlmixed/index.html +52 -0
  151. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/javascript/index.html +78 -0
  152. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/javascript/javascript.js +348 -0
  153. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/lua/index.html +72 -0
  154. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/lua/lua.js +138 -0
  155. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/php/index.html +49 -0
  156. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/php/php.js +110 -0
  157. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/plsql/index.html +63 -0
  158. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/plsql/plsql.js +217 -0
  159. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/python/LICENSE.txt +21 -0
  160. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/python/index.html +123 -0
  161. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/python/python.js +321 -0
  162. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/rst/index.html +526 -0
  163. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/rst/rst.css +75 -0
  164. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/rst/rst.js +333 -0
  165. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/scheme/index.html +65 -0
  166. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/scheme/scheme.js +181 -0
  167. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/smalltalk/index.html +56 -0
  168. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/smalltalk/smalltalk.js +134 -0
  169. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/sparql/index.html +41 -0
  170. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/sparql/sparql.js +143 -0
  171. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/stex/index.html +96 -0
  172. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/stex/stex.js +167 -0
  173. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/xml/index.html +42 -0
  174. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/xml/xml.js +231 -0
  175. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/yaml/index.html +68 -0
  176. data/public/CodeMirror/mode/yaml/yaml.js +95 -0
  177. data/public/CodeMirror/oldrelease.html +178 -0
  178. data/public/CodeMirror/test/index.html +29 -0
  179. data/public/CodeMirror/test/test.js +249 -0
  180. data/public/CodeMirror/theme/default.css +18 -0
  181. data/public/CodeMirror/theme/elegant.css +9 -0
  182. data/public/CodeMirror/theme/jtalk.css +21 -0
  183. data/public/CodeMirror/theme/neat.css +8 -0
  184. data/public/CodeMirror/theme/night.css +20 -0
  185. data/public/css/jtalk.css +362 -0
  186. data/public/css/style.css +456 -0
  187. data/public/css/sunit.css +66 -0
  188. data/public/ide/fork_me.png +0 -0
  189. data/public/ide/screen2.png +0 -0
  190. data/public/ide/style.css +456 -0
  191. data/public/ide/syntax.css +61 -0
  192. data/public/ide/text_header.png +0 -0
  193. data/public/ide/title_container1.png +0 -0
  194. data/public/images/background_box.png +0 -0
  195. data/public/images/background_header.png +0 -0
  196. data/public/images/balloon_header.png +0 -0
  197. data/views/index.haml +66 -0
  198. metadata +341 -0
@@ -0,0 +1,389 @@
1
+ <!doctype html>
2
+ <html>
3
+ <head>
4
+ <title>CodeMirror: Internals</title>
5
+ <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans|Droid+Sans:bold"/>
6
+ <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/docs.css"/>
7
+ <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
8
+ <style>dl dl {margin: 0;}</style>
9
+ </head>
10
+ <body>
11
+
12
+ <h1><span class="logo-braces">{ }</span> <a href="http://codemirror.net/">CodeMirror</a></h1>
13
+
14
+ <pre class="grey">
15
+ <img src="css/baboon.png" class="logo" alt="logo"/>/* (Re-) Implementing A Syntax-
16
+ Highlighting Editor in JavaScript */
17
+ </pre>
18
+
19
+ <div class="clear"><div class="leftbig blk">
20
+
21
+ <p style="font-size: 85%" id="intro">
22
+ <strong>Topic:</strong> JavaScript, code editor implementation<br>
23
+ <strong>Author:</strong> Marijn Haverbeke<br>
24
+ <strong>Date:</strong> March 2nd 2011
25
+ </p>
26
+
27
+ <p>This is a followup to
28
+ my <a href="http://codemirror.net/story.html">Brutal Odyssey to the
29
+ Dark Side of the DOM Tree</a> story. That one describes the
30
+ mind-bending process of implementing (what would become) CodeMirror 1.
31
+ This one describes the internals of CodeMirror 2, a complete rewrite
32
+ and rethink of the old code base. I wanted to give this piece another
33
+ Hunter Thompson copycat subtitle, but somehow that would be out of
34
+ place—the process this time around was one of straightforward
35
+ engineering, requiring no serious mind-bending whatsoever.</p>
36
+
37
+ <p>So, what is wrong with CodeMirror 1? I'd estimate, by mailing list
38
+ activity and general search-engine presence, that it has been
39
+ integrated into about a thousand systems by now. The most prominent
40
+ one, since a few weeks,
41
+ being <a href="http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/01/make-quick-fixes-quicker-on-google.html">Google
42
+ code's project hosting</a>. It works, and it's being used widely.</a>
43
+
44
+ <p>Still, I did not start replacing it because I was bored. CodeMirror
45
+ 1 was heavily reliant on <code>designMode</code>
46
+ or <code>contentEditable</code> (depending on the browser). Neither of
47
+ these are well specified (HTML5 tries
48
+ to <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/editing.html#contenteditable">specify</a>
49
+ their basics), and, more importantly, they tend to be one of the more
50
+ obscure and buggy areas of browser functionality—CodeMirror, by using
51
+ this functionality in a non-typical way, was constantly running up
52
+ against browser bugs. WebKit wouldn't show an empty line at the end of
53
+ the document, and in some releases would suddenly get unbearably slow.
54
+ Firefox would show the cursor in the wrong place. Internet Explorer
55
+ would insist on linkifying everything that looked like a URL or email
56
+ address, a behaviour that can't be turned off. Some bugs I managed to
57
+ work around (which was often a frustrating, painful process), others,
58
+ such as the Firefox cursor placement, I gave up on, and had to tell
59
+ user after user that they were known problems, but not something I
60
+ could help.</p>
61
+
62
+ <p>Also, there is the fact that <code>designMode</code> (which seemed
63
+ to be less buggy than <code>contentEditable</code> in Webkit and
64
+ Firefox, and was thus used by CodeMirror 1 in those browsers) requires
65
+ a frame. Frames are another tricky area. It takes some effort to
66
+ prevent getting tripped up by domain restrictions, they don't
67
+ initialize synchronously, behave strangely in response to the back
68
+ button, and, on several browsers, can't be moved around the DOM
69
+ without having them re-initialize. They did provide a very nice way to
70
+ namespace the library, though—CodeMirror 1 could freely pollute the
71
+ namespace inside the frame.</p>
72
+
73
+ <p>Finally, working with an editable document means working with
74
+ selection in arbitrary DOM structures. Internet Explorer (8 and
75
+ before) has an utterly different (and awkward) selection API than all
76
+ of the other browsers, and even among the different implementations of
77
+ <code>document.selection</code>, details about how exactly a selection
78
+ is represented vary quite a bit. Add to that the fact that Opera's
79
+ selection support tended to be very buggy until recently, and you can
80
+ imagine why CodeMirror 1 contains 700 lines of selection-handling
81
+ code.</p>
82
+
83
+ <p>And that brings us to the main issue with the CodeMirror 1
84
+ code base: The proportion of browser-bug-workarounds to real
85
+ application code was getting dangerously high. By building on top of a
86
+ few dodgy features, I put the system in a vulnerable position—any
87
+ incompatibility and bugginess in these features, I had to paper over
88
+ with my own code. Not only did I have to do some serious stunt-work to
89
+ get it to work on older browsers (as detailed in the
90
+ previous <a href="http://codemirror.net/story.html">story</a>), things
91
+ also kept breaking in newly released versions, requiring me to come up
92
+ with <em>new</em> scary hacks in order to keep up. This was starting
93
+ to lose its appeal.</p>
94
+
95
+ <h2 id="approach">General Approach</h2>
96
+
97
+ <p>What CodeMirror 2 does is try to sidestep most of the hairy hacks
98
+ that came up in version 1. I owe a lot to the
99
+ <a href="http://ace.ajax.org">ACE</a> editor for inspiration on how to
100
+ approach this.</p>
101
+
102
+ <p>I absolutely did not want to be completely reliant on key events to
103
+ generate my input. Every JavaScript programmer knows that key event
104
+ information is horrible and incomplete. Some people (most awesomely
105
+ Mihai Bazon with <a href="http://ymacs.org">Ymacs</a>) have been able
106
+ to build more or less functioning editors by directly reading key
107
+ events, but it takes a lot of work (the kind of never-ending, fragile
108
+ work I described earlier), and will never be able to properly support
109
+ things like multi-keystoke international character input.</p>
110
+
111
+ <p>So what I do is focus a hidden textarea, and let the browser
112
+ believe that the user is typing into that. What we show to the user is
113
+ a DOM structure we built to represent his document. If this is updated
114
+ quickly enough, and shows some kind of believable cursor, it feels
115
+ like a real text-input control.</p>
116
+
117
+ <p>Another big win is that this DOM representation does not have to
118
+ span the whole document. Some CodeMirror 1 users insisted that they
119
+ needed to put a 30 thousand line XML document into CodeMirror. Putting
120
+ all that into the DOM takes a while, especially since, for some
121
+ reason, an editable DOM tree is slower than a normal one on most
122
+ browsers. If we have full control over what we show, we must only
123
+ ensure that the visible part of the document has been added, and can
124
+ do the rest only when needed. (Fortunately, the <code>onscroll</code>
125
+ event works almost the same on all browsers, and lends itself well to
126
+ displaying things only as they are scrolled into view.)</p>
127
+
128
+ <h2 id="input">Input</h2>
129
+
130
+ <p>ACE uses its hidden textarea only as a text input shim, and does
131
+ all cursor movement and things like text deletion itself by directly
132
+ handling key events. CodeMirror's way is to let the browser do its
133
+ thing as much as possible, and not, for example, define its own set of
134
+ key bindings. One way to do this would have been to have the whole
135
+ document inside the hidden textarea, and after each key event update
136
+ the display DOM to reflect what's in that textarea.</p>
137
+
138
+ <p>That'd be simple, but it is not realistic. For even medium-sized
139
+ document the editor would be constantly munging huge strings, and get
140
+ terribly slow. What CodeMirror 2 does is put the current selection,
141
+ along with an extra line on the top and on the bottom, into the
142
+ textarea.</p>
143
+
144
+ <p>This means that the arrow keys (and their ctrl-variations), home,
145
+ end, etcetera, do not have to be handled specially. We just read the
146
+ cursor position in the textarea, and update our cursor to match it.
147
+ Also, copy and paste work pretty much for free, and people get their
148
+ native key bindings, without any special work on my part. For example,
149
+ I have emacs key bindings configured for Chrome and Firefox. There is
150
+ no way for a script to detect this.</p>
151
+
152
+ <p>Of course, since only a small part of the document sits in the
153
+ textarea, keys like page up and ctrl-end won't do the right thing.
154
+ CodeMirror is catching those events and handling them itself.</p>
155
+
156
+ <h2 id="selection">Selection</h2>
157
+
158
+ <p>Getting and setting the selection range of a textarea in modern
159
+ browsers is trivial—you just use the <code>selectionStart</code>
160
+ and <code>selectionEnd</code> properties. On IE you have to do some
161
+ insane stuff with temporary ranges and compensating for the fact that
162
+ moving the selection by a 'character' will treat \r\n as a single
163
+ character, but even there it is possible to build functions that
164
+ reliably set and get the selection range.</p>
165
+
166
+ <p>But consider this typical case: When I'm somewhere in my document,
167
+ press shift, and press the up arrow, something gets selected. Then, if
168
+ I, still holding shift, press the up arrow again, the top of my
169
+ selection is adjusted. The selection remembers where its <em>head</em>
170
+ and its <em>anchor</em> are, and moves the head when we shift-move.
171
+ This is a generally accepted property of selections, and done right by
172
+ every editing component built in the past twenty years.</p>
173
+
174
+ <p>But not something that the browser selection APIs expose.</p>
175
+
176
+ <p>Great. So when someone creates an 'upside-down' selection, the next
177
+ time CodeMirror has to update the textarea, it'll re-create the
178
+ selection as an 'upside-up' selection, with the anchor at the top, and
179
+ the next cursor motion will behave in an unexpected way—our second
180
+ up-arrow press in the example above will not do anything, since it is
181
+ interpreted in exactly the same way as the first.</p>
182
+
183
+ <p>No problem. We'll just, ehm, detect that the selection is
184
+ upside-down (you can tell by the way it was created), and then, when
185
+ an upside-down selection is present, and a cursor-moving key is
186
+ pressed in combination with shift, we quickly collapse the selection
187
+ in the textarea to its start, allow the key to take effect, and then
188
+ combine its new head with its old anchor to get the <em>real</em>
189
+ selection.</p>
190
+
191
+ <p>In short, scary hacks could not be avoided entirely in CodeMirror
192
+ 2.</p>
193
+
194
+ <p>And, the observant reader might ask, how do you even know that a
195
+ key combo is a cursor-moving combo, if you claim you support any
196
+ native key bindings? Well, we don't, but we can learn. The editor
197
+ keeps a set known cursor-movement combos (initialized to the
198
+ predictable defaults), and updates this set when it observes that
199
+ pressing a certain key had (only) the effect of moving the cursor.
200
+ This, of course, doesn't work if the first time the key is used was
201
+ for extending an inverted selection, but it works most of the
202
+ time.</p>
203
+
204
+ <h2 id="update">Intelligent Updating</h2>
205
+
206
+ <p>One thing that always comes up when you have a complicated internal
207
+ state that's reflected in some user-visible external representation
208
+ (in this case, the displayed code and the textarea's content) is
209
+ keeping the two in sync. The naive way is to just update the display
210
+ every time you change your state, but this is not only error prone
211
+ (you'll forget), it also easily leads to duplicate work on big,
212
+ composite operations. Then you start passing around flags indicating
213
+ whether the display should be updated in an attempt to be efficient
214
+ again and, well, at that point you might as well give up completely.</p>
215
+
216
+ <p>I did go down that road, but then switched to a much simpler model:
217
+ simply keep track of all the things that have been changed during an
218
+ action, and then, only at the end, use this information to update the
219
+ user-visible display.</p>
220
+
221
+ <p>CodeMirror uses a concept of <em>operations</em>, which start by
222
+ calling a specific set-up function that clears the state and end by
223
+ calling another function that reads this state and does the required
224
+ updating. Most event handlers, and all the user-visible methods that
225
+ change state are wrapped like this. There's a method
226
+ called <code>operation</code> that accepts a function, and returns
227
+ another function that wraps the given function as an operation.</p>
228
+
229
+ <p>It's trivial to extend this (as CodeMirror does) to detect nesting,
230
+ and, when an operation is started inside an operation, simply
231
+ increment the nesting count, and only do the updating when this count
232
+ reaches zero again.</p>
233
+
234
+ <p>If we have a set of changed ranges and know the currently shown
235
+ range, we can (with some awkward code to deal with the fact that
236
+ changes can add and remove lines, so we're dealing with a changing
237
+ coordinate system) construct a map of the ranges that were left
238
+ intact. We can then compare this map with the part of the document
239
+ that's currently visible (based on scroll offset and editor height) to
240
+ determine whether something needs to be updated.</p>
241
+
242
+ <p>CodeMirror uses two update algorithms—a full refresh, where it just
243
+ discards the whole part of the DOM that contains the edited text and
244
+ rebuilds it, and a patch algorithm, where it uses the information
245
+ about changed and intact ranges to update only the out-of-date parts
246
+ of the DOM. When more than 30 percent (which is the current heuristic,
247
+ might change) of the lines need to be updated, the full refresh is
248
+ chosen (since it's faster to do than painstakingly finding and
249
+ updating all the changed lines), in the other case it does the
250
+ patching (so that, if you scroll a line or select another character,
251
+ the whole screen doesn't have to be re-rendered).</p>
252
+
253
+ <p>All updating uses <code>innerHTML</code> rather than direct DOM
254
+ manipulation, since that still seems to be by far the fastest way to
255
+ build documents. There's a per-line function that combines the
256
+ highlighting, <a href="manual.html#markText">marking</a>, and
257
+ selection info for that line into a snippet of HTML. The patch updater
258
+ uses this to reset individual lines, the refresh updater builds an
259
+ HTML chunk for the whole visible document at once, and then uses a
260
+ single <code>innerHTML</code> update to do the refresh.</p>
261
+
262
+ <h2 id="parse">Parsers can be Simple</h2>
263
+
264
+ <p>When I wrote CodeMirror 1, I
265
+ thought <a href="http://codemirror.net/story.html#parser">interruptable
266
+ parsers</a> were a hugely scary and complicated thing, and I used a
267
+ bunch of heavyweight abstractions to keep this supposed complexity
268
+ under control: parsers
269
+ were <a href="http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/07/06/iteration-in-javascript/">iterators</a>
270
+ that consumed input from another iterator, and used funny
271
+ closure-resetting tricks to copy and resume themselves.</p>
272
+
273
+ <p>This made for a rather nice system, in that parsers formed strictly
274
+ separate modules, and could be composed in predictable ways.
275
+ Unfortunately, it was quite slow (stacking three or four iterators on
276
+ top of each other), and extremely intimidating to people not used to a
277
+ functional programming style.</p>
278
+
279
+ <p>With a few small changes, however, we can keep all those
280
+ advantages, but simplify the API and make the whole thing less
281
+ indirect and inefficient. CodeMirror
282
+ 2's <a href="manual.html#modeapi">mode API</a> uses explicit state
283
+ objects, and makes the parser/tokenizer a function that simply takes a
284
+ state and a character stream abstraction, advances the stream one
285
+ token, and returns the way the token should be styled. This state may
286
+ be copied, optionally in a mode-defined way, in order to be able to
287
+ continue a parse at a given point. Even someone who's never touched a
288
+ lambda in his life can understand this approach. Additionally, far
289
+ fewer objects are allocated in the course of parsing now.</p>
290
+
291
+ <p>The biggest speedup comes from the fact that the parsing no longer
292
+ has to touch the DOM though. In CodeMirror 1, on an older browser, you
293
+ could <em>see</em> the parser work its way through the document,
294
+ managing some twenty lines in each 50-millisecond time slice it got. It
295
+ was reading its input from the DOM, and updating the DOM as it went
296
+ along, which any experienced JavaScript programmer will immediately
297
+ spot as a recipe for slowness. In CodeMirror 2, the parser usually
298
+ finishes the whole document in a single 100-millisecond time slice—it
299
+ manages some 1500 lines during that time on Chrome. All it has to do
300
+ is munge strings, so there is no real reason for it to be slow
301
+ anymore.</p>
302
+
303
+ <h2 id="summary">What Gives?</h2>
304
+
305
+ <p>Given all this, what can you expect from CodeMirror 2? First, the
306
+ good:</p>
307
+
308
+ <ul>
309
+
310
+ <li><strong>Small.</strong> the base library is some 32k when minified
311
+ now, 12k when gzipped. It's smaller than its own logo.</li>
312
+
313
+ <li><strong>Lightweight.</strong> CodeMirror 2 initializes very
314
+ quickly, and does almost no work when it is not focused. This means
315
+ you can treat it almost like a textarea, have multiple instances on a
316
+ page without trouble.</li>
317
+
318
+ <li><strong>Huge document support.</strong> Since highlighting is
319
+ really fast, and no DOM structure is being built for non-visible
320
+ content, you don't have to worry about locking up your browser when a
321
+ user enters a megabyte-sized document.</li>
322
+
323
+ <li><strong>Extended API.</strong> Some things kept coming up in the
324
+ mailing list, such as marking pieces of text or lines, which were
325
+ extremely hard to do with CodeMirror 1. The new version has proper
326
+ support for these built in.</li>
327
+
328
+ <li><strong>Tab support.</strong> Tabs inside editable documents were,
329
+ for some reason, a no-go. At least six different people announced they
330
+ were going to add tab support to CodeMirror 1, none survived (I mean,
331
+ none delivered a working version). CodeMirror 2 no longer removes tabs
332
+ from your document.</li>
333
+
334
+ <li><strong>Sane styling.</strong> <code>iframe</code> nodes aren't
335
+ really known for respecting document flow. Now that an editor instance
336
+ is a plain <code>div</code> element, it is much easier to size it to
337
+ fit the surrounding elements. You don't even have to make it scroll if
338
+ you do not <a href="demo/resize.html">want to</a>.</li>
339
+
340
+ </ul>
341
+
342
+ <p>Then, the bad:</p>
343
+
344
+ <ul>
345
+
346
+ <li><strong>No line-wrapping.</strong> I'd have liked to get
347
+ line-wrapping to work, but it doesn't match the model I'm using very
348
+ well. It is important that cursor movement in the textarea matches
349
+ what you see on the screen, and it seems to be impossible to have the
350
+ lines wrapped the same in the textarea and the normal DOM.</li>
351
+
352
+ <li><strong>Some cursor flakiness.</strong> The textarea hack does not
353
+ really do justice to the complexity of cursor handling—a selection is
354
+ typically more than just an offset into a string. For example, if you
355
+ use the up and down arrow keys to move to a shorter line and then
356
+ back, you'll end up in your old position in most editor controls, but
357
+ CodeMirror 2 currently doesn't remember the 'real' cursor column in
358
+ this case. These can be worked around on a case-by-case basis, but
359
+ I haven't put much energy into that yet.</li>
360
+
361
+ <li><strong>Limited interaction with the editable panel.</strong>
362
+ Since the element you're looking at is not a real editable panel,
363
+ native browser behaviour for editable controls doesn't work
364
+ automatically. Through a lot of event glue code, I've managed to make
365
+ drag and drop work pretty well, have context menus work on most
366
+ browsers (except Opera). Middle-click paste on Firefox in Linux is
367
+ broken until someone finds a way to intercept it.</li>
368
+
369
+ </ul>
370
+
371
+ </div><div class="rightsmall blk">
372
+
373
+ <h2>Contents</h2>
374
+
375
+ <ul>
376
+ <li><a href="#intro">Introduction</a></li>
377
+ <li><a href="#approach">General Approach</a></li>
378
+ <li><a href="#input">Input</a></li>
379
+ <li><a href="#selection">Selection</a></li>
380
+ <li><a href="#update">Intelligent Updating</a></li>
381
+ <li><a href="#parse">Parsing</a></li>
382
+ <li><a href="#summary">What Gives?</a></li>
383
+ </ul>
384
+
385
+ </div></div>
386
+
387
+ <div style="height: 2em">&nbsp;</div>
388
+
389
+ </body></html>
@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
1
+ .CodeMirror {
2
+ line-height: 1em;
3
+ font-family: monospace;
4
+ }
5
+
6
+ .CodeMirror-scroll {
7
+ overflow: auto;
8
+ height: 300px;
9
+ /* This is needed to prevent an IE[67] bug where the scrolled content
10
+ is visible outside of the scrolling box. */
11
+ position: relative;
12
+ }
13
+
14
+ .CodeMirror-gutter {
15
+ position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0;
16
+ background-color: #f7f7f7;
17
+ border-right: 1px solid #eee;
18
+ min-width: 2em;
19
+ height: 100%;
20
+ }
21
+ .CodeMirror-gutter-text {
22
+ color: #aaa;
23
+ text-align: right;
24
+ padding: .4em .2em .4em .4em;
25
+ }
26
+ .CodeMirror-lines {
27
+ padding: .4em;
28
+ }
29
+
30
+ .CodeMirror pre {
31
+ -moz-border-radius: 0;
32
+ -webkit-border-radius: 0;
33
+ -o-border-radius: 0;
34
+ border-radius: 0;
35
+ border-width: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background: transparent;
36
+ font-family: inherit;
37
+ font-size: inherit;
38
+ padding: 0; margin: 0;
39
+ white-space: pre;
40
+ word-wrap: normal;
41
+ }
42
+
43
+ .CodeMirror textarea {
44
+ font-family: inherit !important;
45
+ font-size: inherit !important;
46
+ }
47
+
48
+ .CodeMirror-cursor {
49
+ z-index: 10;
50
+ position: absolute;
51
+ visibility: hidden;
52
+ border-left: 1px solid black !important;
53
+ }
54
+ .CodeMirror-focused .CodeMirror-cursor {
55
+ visibility: visible;
56
+ }
57
+
58
+ span.CodeMirror-selected {
59
+ background: #ccc !important;
60
+ color: HighlightText !important;
61
+ }
62
+ .CodeMirror-focused span.CodeMirror-selected {
63
+ background: Highlight !important;
64
+ }
65
+
66
+ .CodeMirror-matchingbracket {color: #0f0 !important;}
67
+ .CodeMirror-nonmatchingbracket {color: #f22 !important;}