Rich Markup in TextArea?

[DrRichardDaystrom]

Is it possible to render rich markup in a TextArea widget? I understand how to get it to render markdown but that is not sufficient to my needs (nor is syntax highlighting). I can get rich markup to render in a Static widget but I would really like to leverage all of the cursor functionality in TextArea. I would like to avoid having to rebuild a custom widget from Static since it seems tricky to implement the cursor functionality. Please advise.

[willmcgugan]

That isn't currently possible. Could you expand on the problem you are solving? Without additional detail, this sounds like an XY problem

[DrRichardDaystrom]

I would like to render various types of NLP markup on medium- to long-form text documents. As an example, consider coloring all the verbs and adverbs in a short story. Static works great with markup, even when I update the content, but I really like TextArea’s cursor functionality. Extending the verb/adverb coloring example, I would like to be able to select a single word (token) in the source document and display deeper NLP parse information in a separate inspector panel. The cursor would be super useful for this and I considered trying to build my own custom widget by adding the cursor to Static but, when I looked at the TextArea source, it looked like that would be hard to do. I also considered building a custom token widget and then packing my own lines in a ScrollView but Textual’s soft wrap is already awesome and one of the things that attracted me (as a rich user) in the first place.

Does that help? Can you help point me in a more fruitful direction?

[DrRichardDaystrom]

FWIW, I ultimately decided to bite the bullet and pack my own lines with custom widgets. The advantage of this is that it allows me to keep the native NLP data object in the widget and can then use its attributes to respond to UI events. So far, it seems to be working well and is responsive at least up to the size my test document (850 tokens which means 850 reactive widgets on screen at the same time).