{ } CodeMirror

Overview

CodeMirror is a code-editor component that can be embedded in Web pages. It provides only the editor component, no accompanying buttons (see CodeMirror UI for a drop-in button bar), auto-completion, or other IDE functionality. It does provide a rich API on top of which such functionality can be straightforwardly implemented.

CodeMirror works with language-specific modes. Modes are JavaScript programs that help color (and optionally indent) text written in a given language. The distribution comes with a few modes (see the mode/ directory), and it isn't hard to write new ones for other languages.

Basic Usage

The easiest way to use CodeMirror is to simply load the script and style sheet found under lib/ in the distribution, plus a mode script from one of the mode/ directories and a theme stylesheet from theme/. (See also the compresion helper.) For example:

<script src="lib/codemirror.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="lib/codemirror.css">
<script src="mode/javascript/javascript.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="theme/default.css">

(If you use a them other than default.css, you also have to specify the theme option.) Having done this, an editor instance can be created like this:

var myCodeMirror = CodeMirror(document.body);

The editor will be appended to the document body, will start empty, and will use the mode that we loaded. To have more control over the new editor, a configuration object can be passed to CodeMirror as a second argument:

var myCodeMirror = CodeMirror(document.body, {
  value: "function myScript(){return 100;}\n",
  mode:  "javascript"
});

This will initialize the editor with a piece of code already in it, and explicitly tell it to use the JavaScript mode (which is useful when multiple modes are loaded). See below for a full discussion of the configuration options that CodeMirror accepts.

In cases where you don't want to append the editor to an element, and need more control over the way it is inserted, the first argument to the CodeMirror function can also be a function that, when given a DOM element, inserts it into the document somewhere. This could be used to, for example, replace a textarea with a real editor:

var myCodeMirror = CodeMirror(function(elt) {
  myTextArea.parentNode.replaceChild(elt, myTextArea);
}, {value: myTextArea.value});

However, for this use case, which is a common way to use CodeMirror, the library provides a much more powerful shortcut:

var myCodeMirror = CodeMirror.fromTextArea(myTextArea);

This will, among other things, ensure that the textarea's value is updated when the form (if it is part of a form) is submitted. See the API reference for a full description of this method.

Configuration

Both the CodeMirror function and its fromTextArea method take as second (optional) argument an object containing configuration options. Any option not supplied like this will be taken from CodeMirror.defaults, an object containing the default options. You can update this object to change the defaults on your page.

Options are not checked in any way, so setting bogus option values is bound to lead to odd errors.

Note: CodeMirror 2 does not support line-wrapping. I would have very much liked to support it, but it combines extremely poorly with the way the editor is implemented.

These are the supported options:

value (string)

The starting value of the editor.

mode (string or object)

The mode to use. When not given, this will default to the first mode that was loaded. It may be a string, which either simply names the mode or is a MIME type associated with the mode. Alternatively, it may be an object containing configuration options for the mode, with a name property that names the mode (for example {name: "javascript", json: true}). The demo pages for each mode contain information about what configuration parameters the mode supports. You can ask CodeMirror which modes and MIME types are loaded with the CodeMirror.listModes and CodeMirror.listMIMEs functions.

theme (string)

The theme to style the editor with. You must make sure the CSS file defining the corresponding .cm-s-[name] styles is loaded (see the theme directory in the distribution).

indentUnit (integer)

How many spaces a block (whatever that means in the edited language) should be indented. The default is 2.

indentWithTabs (boolean)

Whether, when indenting, the first N*8 spaces should be replaced by N tabs. Default is false.

tabMode (string)

Determines what happens when the user presses the tab key. Must be one of the following:

"classic" (the default)

When nothing is selected, insert a tab. Otherwise, behave like the "shift" mode. (When shift is held, this behaves like the "indent" mode.)

"shift"

Indent all selected lines by one indentUnit. If shift was held while pressing tab, un-indent all selected lines one unit.

"indent"

Indent the line the 'correctly', based on its syntactic context. Only works if the mode supports it.

"default"

Do not capture tab presses, let the browser apply its default behaviour (which usually means it skips to the next control).

enterMode (string)

Determines whether and how new lines are indented when the enter key is pressed. The following modes are supported:

"indent" (the default)

Use the mode's indentation rules to give the new line the correct indentation.

"keep"

Indent the line the same as the previous line.

"flat"

Do not indent the new line.

electricChars (boolean)

Configures whether the editor should re-indent the current line when a character is typed that might change its proper indentation (only works if the mode supports indentation). Default is true.

lineNumbers (boolean)

Whether to show line numbers to the left of the editor.

firstLineNumber (integer)

At which number to start counting lines. Default is 1.

gutter (boolean)

Can be used to force a 'gutter' (empty space on the left of the editor) to be shown even when no line numbers are active. This is useful for setting markers.

readOnly (boolean)

This disables editing of the editor content by the user. (Changes through API functions will still be possible.) If you also want to disable the cursor, use "nocursor" as a value for this option, instead of true.

onChange (function)

When given, this function will be called every time the content of the editor is changed. It will be given the editor instance as only argument.

onCursorActivity (function)

Like onChange, but will also be called when the cursor moves without any changes being made.

onGutterClick (function)

When given, will be called whenever the editor gutter (the line-number area) is clicked. Will be given the editor instance as first argument, and the (zero-based) number of the line that was clicked as second argument.

onFocus, onBlur (function)

The given functions will be called whenever the editor is focused or unfocused.

onScroll (function)

When given, will be called whenever the editor is scrolled.

onHighlightComplete (function)

Whenever the editor's content has been fully highlighted, this function (if given) will be called. It'll be given a single argument, the editor instance.

matchBrackets (boolean)

Determines whether brackets are matched whenever the cursor is moved next to a bracket.

workTime, workDelay (number)

Highlighting is done by a pseudo background-thread that will work for workTime milliseconds, and then use timeout to sleep for workDelay milliseconds. The defaults are 200 and 300, you can change these options to make the highlighting more or less aggressive.

undoDepth (integer)

The maximum number of undo levels that the editor stores. Defaults to 40.

tabindex (integer)

The tab index to assign to the editor. If not given, no tab index will be assigned.

document (DOM document)

Use this if you want to display the editor in another DOM. By default it will use the global document object.

onKeyEvent (function)

This provides a rather low-level hook into CodeMirror's key handling. If provided, this function will be called on every keydown, keyup, and keypress event that CodeMirror captures. It will be passed two arguments, the editor instance and the key event. This key event is pretty much the raw key event, except that a stop() method is always added to it. You could feed it to, for example, jQuery.Event to further normalize it.
This function can inspect the key event, and handle it if it wants to. It may return true to tell CodeMirror to ignore the event. Be wary that, on some browsers, stopping a keydown does not stop the keypress from firing, whereas on others it does. If you respond to an event, you should probably inspect its type property and only do something when it is keydown (or keypress for actions that need character data).

Customized Styling

Up to a certain extent, CodeMirror's look can be changed by modifying style sheet files. The style sheets supplied by modes simply provide the colors for that mode, and can be adapted in a very straightforward way. To style the editor itself, it is possible to alter or override the styles defined in codemirror.css.

Some care must be taken there, since a lot of the rules in this file are necessary to have CodeMirror function properly. Adjusting colors should be safe, of course, and with some care a lot of other things can be changed as well. The CSS classes defined in this file serve the following roles:

CodeMirror

The outer element of the editor. This should be used for borders and positioning. Can also be used to set styles that should hold for everything inside the editor (such as font and font size), or to set a background.

CodeMirror-scroll

This determines whether the editor scrolls (overflow: auto + fixed height). By default, it does. Giving this height: auto; overflow: visible; will cause the editor to resize to fit its content.

CodeMirror-focused

Whenever the editor is focused, the top element gets this class. This is used to hide the cursor and give the selection a different color when the editor is not focused.

CodeMirror-gutter

Use this for giving a background or a border to the editor gutter. Don't set any padding here, use CodeMirror-gutter-text for that. By default, the gutter is 'fluid', meaning it will adjust its width to the maximum line number or line marker width. You can also set a fixed width if you want.

CodeMirror-gutter-text

Used to style the actual line numbers. For the numbers to line up, you must make sure that the font in the gutter is the same as the one in the rest of the editor, so you should probably only set font style and size in the CodeMirror class.

CodeMirror-lines

The visible lines. If this has vertical padding, CodeMirror-gutter should have the same padding.

CodeMirror-cursor

The cursor is a block element that is absolutely positioned. You can make it look whichever way you want.

CodeMirror-selected

The selection is represented by span elements with this class.

CodeMirror-matchingbracket, CodeMirror-nonmatchingbracket

These are used to style matched (or unmatched) brackets.

The actual lines, as well as the cursor, are represented by pre elements. By default no text styling (such as bold) that might change line height is applied. If you do want such effects, you'll have to give CodeMirror pre a fixed height. Also, you must still take care that character width is constant.

If your page's style sheets do funky things to all div or pre elements (you probably shouldn't do that), you'll have to define rules to cancel these effects out again for elements under the CodeMirror class.

Programming API

A lot of CodeMirror features are only available through its API. This has the disadvantage that you need to do work to enable them, and the advantage that CodeMirror will fit seamlessly into your application.

Whenever points in the document are represented, the API uses objects with line and ch properties. Both are zero-based. CodeMirror makes sure to 'clip' any positions passed by client code so that they fit inside the document, so you shouldn't worry too much about sanitizing your coordinates. If you give ch a value of null, or don't specify it, it will be replaced with the length of the specified line.

getValue() → string

Get the current editor content.

setValue(string)

Set the editor content.

getSelection() → string

Get the currently selected code.

replaceSelection(string)

Replace the selection with the given string.

focus()

Give the editor focus.

setOption(option, value)

Change the configuration of the editor. option should the name of an option, and value should be a valid value for that option.

getOption(option) → value

Retrieves the current value of the given option for this editor instance.

cursorCoords(start) → object

Returns an {x, y, yBot} object containing the coordinates of the cursor relative to the top-left corner of the page. yBot is the coordinate of the bottom of the cursor. start is a boolean indicating whether you want the start or the end of the selection.

charCoords(pos) → object

Like cursorCoords, but returns the position of an arbitrary characters. pos should be a {line, ch} object.

coordsChar(object) → pos

Given an {x, y} object (in page coordinates), returns the {line, ch} position that corresponds to it.

undo()

Undo one edit (if any undo events are stored).

redo()

Redo one undone edit.

historySize() → object

Returns an object with {undo, redo} properties, both of which hold integers, indicating the amount of stored undo and redo operations.

indentLine(line)

Reset the given line's indentation to the indentation prescribed by the mode.

getSearchCursor(query, start, caseFold) → cursor

Used to implement search/replace functionality. query can be a regular expression or a string (only strings will match across lines—if they contain newlines). start provides the starting position of the search. It can be a {line, ch} object, or can be left off to default to the start of the document. caseFold is only relevant when matching a string. It will cause the search to be case-insensitive. A search cursor has the following methods:

findNext(), findPrevious() → boolean

Search forward or backward from the current position. The return value indicates whether a match was found. If matching a regular expression, the return value will be the array returned by the match method, in case you want to extract matched groups.

from(), to() → object

These are only valid when the last call to findNext or findPrevious did not return false. They will return {line, ch} objects pointing at the start and end of the match.

replace(text)

Replaces the currently found match with the given text and adjusts the cursor position to reflect the replacement.

getTokenAt(pos) → object

Retrieves information about the token the current mode found at the given position (a {line, ch} object). The returned object has the following properties:

start

The character (on the given line) at which the token starts.

end

The character at which the token ends.

string

The token's string.

className

The class the mode assigned to the token. (Can be null when no class was assigned.)

state

The mode's state at the end of this token.

markText(from, to, className) → function

Can be used to mark a range of text with a specific CSS class name. from and to should be {line, ch} objects. The method will return a function that can be called to remove the marking.

setMarker(line, text, className) → lineHandle

Add a gutter marker for the given line. Gutter markers are shown in the line-number area (instead of the number for this line). Both text and className are optional. Setting text to a Unicode character like ● tends to give a nice effect. To put a picture in the gutter, set text to a space and className to something that sets a background image. If you specify text, the given text (which may contain HTML) will, by default, replace the line number for that line. If this is not what you want, you can include the string %N% in the text, which will be replaced by the line number.

clearMarker(line)

Clears a marker created with setMarker. line can be either a number or a handle returned by setMarker (since a number may now refer to a different line if something was added or deleted).

setLineClass(line, className) → lineHandle

Set a CSS class name for the given line. line can be a number or a line handle (as returned by setMarker or this function). Pass null to clear the class for a line.

lineInfo(line) → object

Returns the line number, text content, and marker status of the given line, which can be either a number or a handle returned by setMarker. The returned object has the structure {line, text, markerText, markerClass}.

addWidget(pos, node, scrollIntoView)

Puts node, which should be an absolutely positioned DOM node, into the editor, positioned right below the given {line, ch} position. When scrollIntoView is true, the editor will ensure that the entire node is visible (if possible). To remove the widget again, simply use DOM methods (move it somewhere else, or call removeChild on its parent).

matchBrackets()

Force matching-bracket-highlighting to happen.

lineCount() → number

Get the number of lines in the editor.

getCursor(start) → object

start is a boolean indicating whether the start or the end of the selection must be retrieved. If it is not given, the current cursor pos, i.e. the side of the selection that would move if you pressed an arrow key, is chosen. A {line, ch} object will be returned.

somethingSelected() → boolean

Return true if any text is selected.

setCursor(pos)

Set the cursor position. You can either pass a single {line, ch} object, or the line and the character as two separate parameters.

setSelection(start, end)

Set the selection range. start and end should be {line, ch} objects.

getLine(n) → string

Get the content of line n.

setLine(n, text)

Set the content of line n.

removeLine(n)

Remove the given line from the document.

getRange(from, to) → string

Get the text between the given points in the editor, which should be {line, ch} objects.

replaceRange(string, from, to)

Replace the part of the document between from and to with the given string. from and to must be {line, ch} objects. to can be left off to simply insert the string at position from.

The following are more low-level methods:

operation(func) → result

CodeMirror internally buffers changes and only updates its DOM structure after it has finished performing some operation. If you need to perform a lot of operations on a CodeMirror instance, you can call this method with a function argument. It will call the function, buffering up all changes, and only doing the expensive update after the function returns. This can be a lot faster. The return value from this method will be the return value of your function.

refresh()

If your code does something to change the size of the editor element (window resizes are already listened for), or unhides it, you should probably follow up by calling this method to ensure CodeMirror is still looking as intended.

getInputField() → textarea

Returns the hiden textarea used to read input.

getWrapperElement() → node

Returns the DOM node that represents the editor. Remove this from your tree to delete an editor instance.

getScrollerElement() → node

Returns the DOM node that is responsible for the sizing and the scrolling of the editor. You can change the height and width styles of this element to resize an editor. (You might have to call the refresh method afterwards.)

getStateAfter(line) → state

Returns the mode's parser state, if any, at the end of the given line number. If no line number is given, the state at the end of the document is returned. This can be useful for storing parsing errors in the state, or getting other kinds of contextual information for a line.

Finally, the CodeMirror object itself has a method fromTextArea. This takes a textarea DOM node as first argument and an optional configuration object as second. It will replace the textarea with a CodeMirror instance, and wire up the form of that textarea (if any) to make sure the editor contents are put into the textarea when the form is submitted. A CodeMirror instance created this way has two additional methods:

save()

Copy the content of the editor into the textarea.

toTextArea()

Remove the editor, and restore the original textarea (with the editor's current content).

If you want define extra methods in terms of the CodeMirror API, is it possible to use CodeMirror.defineExtension(name, value). This will cause the given value (usually a method) to be added to all CodeMirror instances created from then on.

Writing CodeMirror Modes

Modes typically consist of a JavaScript file and a CSS file. The CSS file (see, for example javascript.css) defines the classes that will be used to style the syntactic elements of the code, and the script contains the logic to actually assign these classes to the right pieces of text.

You'll usually want to use some kind of prefix for your CSS classes, so that they are unlikely to clash with other classes, both those used by other modes and those defined by the page in which CodeMirror is embedded.

The mode script should call CodeMirror.defineMode to register itself with CodeMirror. This function takes two arguments. The first should be the name of the mode, for which you should use a lowercase string, preferably one that is also the name of the files that define the mode (i.e. "xml" is defined xml.js). The second argument should be a function that, given a CodeMirror configuration object (the thing passed to the CodeMirror function) and a mode configuration object (as in the mode option), returns a mode object.

Typically, you should use this second argument to defineMode as your module scope function (modes should not leak anything into the global scope!), i.e. write your whole mode inside this function.

The main responsibility of a mode script is parsing the content of the editor. Depending on the language and the amount of functionality desired, this can be done in really easy or extremely complicated ways. Some parsers can be stateless, meaning that they look at one element (token) of the code at a time, with no memory of what came before. Most, however, will need to remember something. This is done by using a state object, which is an object that can be mutated every time a new token is read.

Modes that use a state must define a startState method on their mode object. This is a function of no arguments that produces a state object to be used at the start of a document.

The most important part of a mode object is its token(stream, state) method. All modes must define this method. It should read one token from the stream it is given as an argument, optionally update its state, and return a style string, or null for tokens that do not have to be styled. For your styles, you can either use the 'standard' ones defined in the themes (without the cm- prefix), or define your own (as the diff mode does) and have people include a custom theme for your mode.

The stream object encapsulates a line of code (tokens may never span lines) and our current position in that line. It has the following API:

eol() → boolean

Returns true only if the stream is at the end of the line.

sol() → boolean

Returns true only if the stream is at the start of the line.

peek() → character

Returns the next character in the stream without advancing it. Will return undefined at the end of the line.

next() → character

Returns the next character in the stream and advances it. Also returns undefined when no more characters are available.

eat(match) → character

match can be a character, a regular expression, or a function that takes a character and returns a boolean. If the next character in the stream 'matches' the given argument, it is consumed and returned. Otherwise, undefined is returned.

eatWhile(match) → boolean

Repeatedly calls eat with the given argument, until it fails. Returns true if any characters were eaten.

eatSpace() → boolean

Shortcut for eatWhile when matching white-space.

skipToEnd()

Moves the position to the end of the line.

skipTo(ch) → boolean

Skips to the next occurrence of the given character, if found. Returns true if the character was found.

match(pattern, consume, caseFold) → boolean

Act like a multi-character eat—if consume is true or not given—or a look-ahead that doesn't update the stream position—if it is false. pattern can be either a string or a regular expression starting with ^. When it is a string, caseFold can be set to true to make the match case-insensitive. When successfully matching a regular expression, the returned value will be the array returned by match, in case you need to extract matched groups.

backUp(n)

Backs up the stream n characters. Backing it up further than the start of the current token will cause things to break, so be careful.

column() → integer

Returns the column (taking into account tabs) at which the current token starts. Can be used to find out whether a token starts a new line.

indentation() → integer

Tells you how far the current line has been indented, in spaces. Corrects for tab characters.

current() → string

Get the string between the start of the current token and the current stream position.

By default, blank lines are simply skipped when tokenizing a document. For languages that have significant blank lines, you can define a blankLine(state) method on your mode that will get called whenever a blank line is passed over, so that it can update the parser state.

Because state object are mutated, and CodeMirror needs to keep valid versions of a state around so that it can restart a parse at any line, copies must be made of state objects. The default algorithm used is that a new state object is created, which gets all the properties of the old object. Any properties which hold arrays get a copy of these arrays (since arrays tend to be used as mutable stacks). When this is not correct, for example because a mode mutates non-array properties of its state object, a mode object should define a copyState method, which is given a state and should return a safe copy of that state.

By default, CodeMirror will stop re-parsing a document as soon as it encounters a few lines that were highlighted the same in the old parse as in the new one. It is possible to provide an explicit way to test whether a state is equivalent to another one, which CodeMirror will use (instead of the unchanged-lines heuristic) to decide when to stop highlighting. You do this by providing a compareStates method on your mode object, which takes two state arguments and returns a boolean indicating whether they are equivalent. See the XML mode, which uses this to provide reliable highlighting of bad closing tags, as an example.

If you want your mode to provide smart indentation (see entermode and tabMode when they have a value of "indent"), you must define an indent(state, textAfter) method on your mode object.

The indentation method should inspect the given state object, and optionally the textAfter string, which contains the text on the line that is being indented, and return an integer, the amount of spaces to indent. It should usually take the indentUnit option into account.

Finally, a mode may define an electricChars property, which should hold a string containing all the characters that should trigger the behaviour described for the electricChars option.

So, to summarize, a mode must provide a token method, and it may provide startState, copyState, and indent methods. For an example of a trivial mode, see the diff mode, for a more involved example, see the JavaScript mode.

Sometimes, it is useful for modes to nest—to have one mode delegate work to another mode. An example of this kind of mode is the mixed-mode HTML mode. To implement such nesting, it is usually necessary to create mode objects and copy states yourself. To create a mode object, there are CodeMirror.getMode(options, parserConfig), where the first argument is a configuration object as passed to the mode constructor function, and the second argument is a mode specification as in the mode option. To copy a state object, call CodeMirror.copyState(mode, state), where mode is the mode that created the given state.

To make indentation work properly in a nested parser, it is advisable to give the startState method of modes that are intended to be nested an optional argument that provides the base indentation for the block of code. The JavaScript and CSS parser do this, for example, to allow JavaScript and CSS code inside the mixed-mode HTML mode to be properly indented.

Finally, it is possible to associate your mode, or a certain configuration of your mode, with a MIME type. For example, the JavaScript mode associates itself with text/javascript, and its JSON variant with application/json. To do this, call CodeMirror.defineMIME(mime, modeSpec), where modeSpec can be a string or object specifying a mode, as in the mode option.