Prevent cursor from going "into" nodeview

1

Our documents have “markers” which are rendered as little blue flags by a nodeview. Ideally, these would be treated atomically, with the cursor navigation moving from one side to the other with a single arrow press (i.e. like a single character). What we see, though, is this:

cursor-disappearing

As far as I can tell, when the cursor is “inside” the marker, the marker node is selected; indeed, if I type something in that state, the marker is replaced by the text.

If I make the marker node unselectable through its NodeSpec, I get the cursor navigation behavior I want, but I lose the ability to select and move the flag with the mouse.

Is there a way to get both qualities, the navigation around the marker and the ability to select it?

2

If selecting the node is a useful thing, why do you want to prevent people from doing that with the keyboard?

3

It should definitely be selectable, but I guess the problems have to do with how that’s presented to the user. For navigation around a normal character, if the cursor is to the left of that character and I press right-arrow, then the cursor moves to the right side of that character. For our marker, that first right-arrow moves the cursor “into” the marker, and a subsequent right-arrow moves it to the right of the marker. Our users get confused by it, and ideally (naively?) we would expect selection of the marker to work like selection of a character.

To make things more concrete, here’s what the nodeview-created DOM for a marker looks like:

<div class="marker" data-marker-name="1" data-selected="false" data-highlighted="false" contenteditable="false" data-visible="true">
    <span class="marker-label">1234</span>
</div>

When I use shift+right-arrow to select a marker, what I see is that the first shift+right-arrow selects the span child in its entirety. Then the next shift+right-arrow selects the following character, like this:

shift-arrow

When the cursor is “inside” the marker, then, I guess it’s actually on the span in some sense.

Is there some way to treat the entire div+span construct as a unit from the perspective of selection? My sense is that I’ve just got the wrong model of how things should work, so I’m working against the grain.

4

That seems reasonable. So if you don’t need node selections, I guess setting up a handleClickOn handler that creates a regular text selection over the marker might be a more consistent way to handle this—so that the two ways of selecting it produce the same type of selection.