How to track caret/cursor in contenteditable?

Question

I\'d like to track the movement of the caret/cursor in a contenteditable. I\'m not sure what\'s the best way to do this, though.

I\'m currently listening for click, key

Answer 1

It's nice to read that people are talking about CKEditor :). I'm one of its developers and I haven't been working much on selection, but I'll try to help.

What I know is that we've got an internal selectionChange event. So when do we check if it changed? ... ... At least once per every 200ms :) See:

http://dev.ckeditor.com/browser/CKEditor/trunk/_source/plugins/selection/plugin.js#L39

We also check selection every time we know that it could have been changed (e.g. by the API or on keyup/mouseup or on native selectionchange - http://dev.ckeditor.com/browser/CKEditor/trunk/_source/plugins/selection/plugin.js#L554). So... pretty much all the time :) AFAIK we do some tricks, so it doesn't burn your CPU, but it's still heavy. However, if we did this, then it's the only possible way to have this working so nicely.

Unfortunately, selection handling is by far the worst task in wysiwygs world. It's so broken in all - old and new browsers. More than 75% LOC in the file I linked above are hacks and tricks. That's complete madness.