Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Modal-Style Text Selection with Fokus

By  on  

Every once in a while I find a tiny JavaScript library that does something very specific, very well.  My latest find, Fokus, is a utility that listens for text selection within the page, and when such an event occurs, shows a beautiful modal dialog in the background of the entire page, allowing only the highlighted block to display at it's normal mode.

View Demo

The HTML

Nothing special needs to be done with the page HTML, and you don't create "active" zones -- simply include the JavaScript file at the bottom of the page:

<!-- at bottom of the page -->
<script src="fokus/js/fokus.min.js" async></script>

The overlay elegantly fades in and out.  Canvas is used to create the overlay, and CSS' pointer-events property is used to ensure event handling consistency.  It would be great if Fokus was a bit more modular, including allowing active zones and customized overlay color, but it's hard to complain about anything else with Fokus.

View Demo

Fokus isn't a necessity for any site, but I was taken aback by how smooth and accurate Fokus is.  Weighing in at just 3KB, it's an impressive little library.  Have an idea for how you'd use Fokus?  Share it!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

  • By
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

Discussion

  1. patrick

    why not using it when using html5 contenteditable. it would play very nice together by let the user focus on the content he wants to edit.

  2. Bilal

    nice find. one thing; your website search box is broke. i couldn’t search for anything directly from the box and i had to use google for searching your website.

  3. smashercosmo

    Nice plugin. But I think, that implementation is too complex. It would be rather simpler to add outline: 999px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.7) to the focused block instead of rendering canvas.

  4. Isiah

    Nice… but until I was told what to do to make it work in the demo I would never have known! And that’s where it falls down.

  5. Scott Korman

    You could totally use this tool to launch a submenu that allows you to print it, send it to someone or post to twitter, etc. It would be super cool and as always you rock for puttin’ this out.

    • Alex

      This is really the best idea for this snippet. Thanks for sharing!

  6. gabby

    how can you have an option to edit the text selected?
    Thank you

  7. s23q

    where is this to download??

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