use-caret-position

A custom React hook for grabbing the caret position in an input field.

Install

npm i use-caret-position

yarn add use-caret-position

Usage

Refer to src/app/index.js for common usage examples.

At a high-level, you pass the hook an input ref.

import useCaretPosition from 'use-caret-position'

const { x, y, getPosition, getSelection } = useCaretPosition(inputRef)

<input type="text" ref="inputRef" onInput{() => getPosition(inputRef)} />
<span style={{ "--x": x, "--y": y }}>I'm the marker</span>

You get an x and y coordinate that you can use to display a marker with. I'd recommend using CSS variables for this. This is what the demos do. getPosition and getSelection are functions you can trigger whenever you need to update the x and y positions.

getPosition returns the position at selectionStart for an input. getSelection returns a midpoint between selectionStart and selectionEnd for an input. It's tricky to provide an exact accurate x and y for the caret in all scenarios so often you might need to adjust the positioning slightly with CSS transforms.

Development

Package is built with parcel-bundler. To get to work, use yarn dev.

To work with the test app, you'll also need to run yarn and yarn dev from within src/app.

To work with the published node module directly, use npm link in the root of the repo.

Then use npm link use-caret-position within src/app.

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Made in haste by @jh3y 2020 😅