CodeMirror: Set Focus at End of Line

By  on  

CodeMirror is a WYSIWYG-like editor that allows for rich text editing on a small scale, oftentimes used to allow Markdown editing, much like ReviewBoard uses it for.  One problem I've found, however, is that calling a CodeMirror instance's focus method put the cursor at the beginning of the input, which is annoying when there is input in the field.  In theory you'd always want to put the cursor at the end so that the user can continue adding to the text that's already there.

Here's a snippet that will set the cursor to the end of existing input:

cmInstance.focus();
// Set the cursor at the end of existing content
cmInstance.setCursor(cmInstance.lineCount(), 0);

You would think that there would be a method which would accomplish this task, or even have focus set the cursor to the end of input by default if the instance has existing text.  Anyways, this is the code that will put the cursor at the end of your CodeMirror input instance!

Recent Features

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Creating the Treehouse Frog Animation

    Before we start, I want to say thank you to David for giving me this awesome opportunity to share this experience with you guys and say that I'm really flattered. I think that CSS animations are really great. When I first learned how CSS...

  • By
    Facebook-Style Modal Box Using MooTools

    In my oh-so-humble opinion, Facebook's Modal box is the best modal box around. It's lightweight, subtle, and very stylish. I've taken Facebook's imagery and CSS and combined it with MooTools' awesome functionality to duplicate the effect. The Imagery Facebook uses a funky sprite for their modal...

Discussion

  1. Harika

    HI David,

    I was able to set cursor at end of the code mirror lines on tab with your code, but after that i want to get out of code mirror window and should move focus to next button.With above code, not able to get focus out of code mirror, can you suggest a way to do that? Thanks.

    This is how i am writing it, also set tabindex=0 for next button available.

     _editor.setOption('extraKeys', {
            Tab(cm) {
              cm.focus();
              cm.setCursor(cm.lineCount(), 0);
            },
          });

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!