Module @trevixal/extension-track-changes

@trevixal/extension-track-changes

Documentation · Live editor · Changelog · Issues

Features

Attributed insertion and deletion marks
Accept and reject, one change or all of them
3.1 kB minified and gzipped, with TypeScript types in the package

Suggestion mode: edits become attributed, timestamped marks to accept or reject, instead of changes to the document.

npm install @trevixal/extension-track-changes

Usage

import { TrackChanges, trackChangesMarks, createTrackChangesBar } from '@trevixal/extension-track-changes'

// Schema: marks: { ...defaultMarks(), ...trackChangesMarks() }
const track = new TrackChanges(editor, { author: 'ada' })
track.enable()

// Typing  → <ins data-trevixal-author="ada" data-trevixal-timestamp="…">
// Deleting → the text stays, wrapped in <del …>

track.suggestions()   // [{ path, from, to, kind, author, timestamp }]
track.acceptAll()
track.rejectAll()
track.acceptAt(position)
track.disable()

createTrackChangesBar(editor, track, { container: reviewHost, author: 'You' })

Switching modes changes no document, so it raises no transaction, and anything watching the editor alone never hears about it. track.onEnabledChange(fn) does. The review bar subscribes to it, so a toggle anywhere (a View menu, a shortcut, a button of your own) is reflected at once:

const off = track.onEnabledChange((enabled) => setIndicator(enabled))

Without it a bar reads "off" while every keystroke is in fact being recorded as a suggestion. The worst way for this feature to be wrong, because the writer believes their edits are going in directly.

How it works, and why that matters

Suggestion mode is a dispatch transform: it rewrites each transaction before it applies, turning a deletion into a strike and an insertion into an attributed run. Every other command in the editor keeps working unchanged. Nothing had to learn about suggestions, because nothing sees them.

It also means history metadata set by the source transaction survives the rewrite, so an input rule that fires in suggestion mode still undoes as one step.

Suggestions carry a time

Each mark records an author and a timestamp, so a reviewer can order them and a document can show who suggested what, when. The attributes round-trip through parseHTML, so a suggestion survives copy and paste.

Known limit

Structural edits: pressing Enter, joining blocks, are not tracked while suggesting. The text of a suggestion is, but a new paragraph is applied directly. Splitting a block is not expressible as an ins/del pair over inline content, and pretending otherwise would produce a document that accept-all could not reconstruct.