writer

An iA Writer-inspired writing app. http://nshki.github.io/writer/

Purpose

This project was a personal programming challenge -- after realizing there is no streamlined way of styling a caret (or I-beam) in an input area, I wanted to try implementing a textarea from scratch.

Approach

The approach that this project is based on is that every typed character is its own DOM element. This means that every keystroke is wrapped in either a <div> or <span>. Inherently, this approach has negative impacts on performance, however, it opens many interesting doors by having granular control over a document.

This approach also means that common, taken-for-granted functionality has to be reprogrammed. This includes features such as moving a cursor around using arrow keys, keyboard shortcuts for navigation, copy/cut/paste, word wrap, and etc.

Development

Writer is built on Middleman and the Sauce Middleman template. All of the functionality is written in CoffeeScript.