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Merge pull request #1012 from processing/textarea-research

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More details surrounding `JEditTextArea`
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Raphaël de Courville
2025-10-24 11:16:41 +02:00
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app/src/processing/app/syntax/README.md
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# 🐉 Fixing this code: here be dragons. 🐉
# Replacing our custom version of JEditTextArea
Since 2025 we have started a migration of Swing to Jetpack Compose and we will eventually need to replace the JEditTextArea as well.
I think a good current strategy would be to start using `RSyntaxTextArea` for an upcoming p5.js mode. `RSyntaxTextArea` is a better maintained and well rounded library. As noted below, a lot of the current state management of the PDE is interetwined with the JEditTextArea implementation. This will force us to decouple the state management out of the `JEditTextArea` whilst also trying to keep backwards compatibility alive for Tweak Mode and the current implementation of autocomplete.
I also did some more research into the potential of using a JS + LSP based editor within Jetpack Compose but as of writing (early 2025) the only way to do so would be to embed chromium into the PDE through something like [Java-CEF]([url](https://github.com/chromiumembedded/java-cef)) and it looks like a PoC for Jetpack Compose Desktop exists [here](https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/blob/9cd413a4ed125bee5b624550fbd40a05061e912a/experimental/cef/src/main/kotlin/org/jetbrains/compose/desktop/browser/BrowserView.kt). Moving the entire PDE into an electron app would be essentially a rewrite which currrently is not the target.
Considering the current direction of the build-in LSP within Processing, I would say that creating a LSP based editor would be a good strategy going forward.
Research needs to be done on how much the Tweak Mode and autocompletion are _actually_ being used. Currently both these features are quite hidden and I suspect that most users actually move on to more advanced use-cases before they even discover such things. I would like to make both of these features much more prominent within the PDE to test if they are a good value add.
### Ben Fry's notes
Every few years, we've looked at replacing this package with [RSyntaxArea](https://github.com/bobbylight/RSyntaxTextArea), most recently with two attempts during the course of developing [Processing 4](https://github.com/processing/processing4/wiki/Processing-4), but probably dating back to the mid-2000s.