Monthly Archives: October 2015

Blog Break

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Hey there Reader!

Over the past couple of weeks I have tried to post a new article or blog every week. And normally I would do the same today. Heck I do have a few posts in draft that I started working and I plan to publish a bit later.

However for the next couple of weeks I will be taking a break from blogging to concentrate on preparing for my PyCon Canada talk, getting some more traction on Rookeries and a new project that I plan on unveiling soon.

I’ll return to my regular blogging schedule sometime in mid or end of November once the dust settles.

Adding a Code Editor to Rookeries

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One of the main selling points for Rookeries, is its ability to let the
writer write content using Markdown, and getting a live preview of the result.
Since the user will be writing in code, it would be a better experience to
use a text editor meant for code. Rather than try to undertake a large task
like this myself, I decided to look around for an editor.

Choosing a Text Editor

My three main concerns for a code editor is for it work properly, integrate
nicely with React and have nice syntax highlighting. After a bit of searching
I found out about the following code editors:

Setting up a Code Mirror-React Component

In the end I chose Code Mirror and specifically the react-codemirror project.
The syntax highlighting does not quite work yet, but I will work on that. The
other integration looked more mature, but ultimately did not want to work for
me.

Setting up the Code Mirror component in Coffee-JSX turned out fairly easy:

React = require 'react'
CodeMirror = require 'react-codemirror'

MyView = React.createClass(
    render: () ->
        options = {lineNumbers: true, mode:'markdown', theme: 'monokai'}
        return (
            <codemirror value={ code } onChange={ @updateCode } options={ options }></codemirror>
        )
)

CSS Gotcha!

Oddly enough just setting up the CodeMirror component did not work right out
of the box. In fact the result was rendering each line as a separated out

 box.  After a bit of digging, I found that the styling was based on the 
pre-existing CSS style provided by Bootstrap... not by Code Mirror!  

The reason turned out to be simple: I had not included the CSS from Code 
Mirror into the app. Since I did not find a CDN with Code Mirror setup, I 
decided to simply include Code Mirror's CSS into my LESS stylesheets for 
Rookeries, based on the example in react-codemirror:

    @import (inline) "../../../node_modules/codemirror/lib/codemirror.css";

This worked well enough, and I've included some of the CodeMirror themes as 
well.

# Outstanding Issues

Currently the text editor works however the setup is missing an important 
feature: syntax highlighting.  In theory Code Mirror should enable syntax 
highlighting based on the passed in mode.  Setting the mode to 'markdown' does 
not seems to achieve the expected result.