This directory contains the Fuchsia front-end modules for xi editor.
In addition to the code here, the Fuchsia xi-core service can be found in //garnet/bin/xi, and shared widgets and models can be found in //topaz/lib/xi.
Status: Experimental
What exists here is primarily a simple text editor, written in Flutter.
xi_mod: This the sample xi-editor Module.
xi_embeddable: This is a barebones editor module intended to be embedded as a child view of other modules, without them having to deal with xi-core. It coordinates with xi_session_agent.
xi_session_agent: An agent that opens a core connection and manages editing sessions. Sessions can be created by any mod, and then connected to by xi_embeddable, which handles the actual editing.
xi_session_demo: A demo mod that makes use of xi_embeddable and xi_session_agent.
To build this package, make sure that the //topaz/packages/prod/xi package is in your manifest.
The following is an overview of ‘Embeddable Xi’, a project to demonstrate how xi-editor could be used to provide generic text editing capabilities to other mods.
As part of ongoing work on the fuchsia text system, we wish to explore providing a mod, backed by Xi, that can be embedded by other mods to provide convenient, full-featured text editing.
This document focuses on the architecture of this service.
Xi-editor is a highly flexible high performance text editing system written in Rust, which is designed to be embedded by various client applications, which can use it to implement anything that needs to manipulate text.
Prior to this work, the only way to use xi-editor in fuchsia was to manually run a xi-core process, and communicate with it directly. This is a high barrier for many potential use-cases. Embeddable Xi is an attempt to simplify this, and make it easy for a module to embed a child module which acts as a text widget, and abstracts away most of the state management.
At a high level, we imagine two principal components; an agent, which manages a number of sessions (each session corresponding to an open buffer/document) and an embeddable module, which is started with a session identifier that it can use to establish a connection with the agent.
The agent owns a single instance of the xi-core process. Each session that the agent is managing is backed by a separate view/buffer pair in xi-core. The xi-core process is not exposed to the embedded module directly; the embedded module communicates with the agent, which forwards messages to xi-core:
A ‘session’ can be thought of as an ephemeral document managed by xi_session_agent. Sessions are created by parent mods, and edited by the embeddable_xi child mod. A parent can have multiple active sessions, and can change which session is currently associated with a given child by setting the child’s link. (not implemented)
When a parent module wants the user to enter some text, it first calls the NewSession fidl method. This returns a session identifier; it passes this identifier to the xi_embeddable module (via its link), and embeds that module as a child. At any point (for instance in response to a button press) it can fetch the contents of the buffer by passing the session identifier to the GetContents fidl method. When it is finished with the session it can call the CloseSession fidl method to clean up session state.