Scroll to Element within CKEditor

By  on  

CKEditor is the outstanding WYSIWYG editor we use on the Mozilla Developer Network.  We have many custom plugins and we do everything we can to make writing easy for contributors.  One trick I just picked up was skipping to an element within the editor by ID and setting the cursor focus within that element.  Here's how!

The JavaScript

You'll start by scrolling the element into view within CKEditor:

var element = editor.document.getById('someHeading');
var range;

if(element) {
    element.scrollIntoView();

    // Thank you S/O
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16835365/set-cursor-to-specific-position-in-ckeditor
    range = editor.createRange();
    range.moveToPosition(element, CKEDITOR.POSITION_AFTER_START);
    editor.getSelection().selectRanges([range]);
}

With the element in view, you'll attempt to insert the cursor at the beginning of the element using a Range.

Firefox will actually insert the cursor for you but Chrome wont, so the Range step is necessary.

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Generate Dojo GFX Drawings from SVG Files

    One of the most awesome parts of the Dojo / Dijit / DojoX family is the amazing GFX library.  GFX lives within the dojox.gfx namespace and provides the foundation of Dojo's charting, drawing, and sketch libraries.  GFX allows you to create vector graphics (SVG, VML...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Tables Plugin

    Tabular data can oftentimes be boring, but it doesn't need to look that way! With a small MooTools class, I can make tabular data extremely easy to read by implementing "zebra" tables -- tables with alternating row background colors. The CSS The above CSS is extremely basic.

Discussion

  1. Instead of

    range.setStart(element, 0);
    range.setEnd(element, 0);
    

    you can simply use

    range.moveToPosition( element, CKEDITOR.POSITION_AFTER_START );
    
  2. Ahmad Raza Cheema

    This will work for sure.

    CKeditor.config.startupFocus = 'end';

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