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Comment by debazel | Hacker News Reader

The example on their website is editable and it looks like they overlay the highlighted output on top of the textarea with `pointer-events: none` like you mentioned.

The code isn't minified so you can see how they do it by looking at the `doHighlight()` function here https://arborium.bearcove.eu/pkg/app.generated.js

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Oh, you are right!

Hmm .. and the approach already shows its weaknesses when I play with it: When I search for something on the page, it gives me twice as many hits as there are. And jumps around two times to each hit when I use the "next" button.

I wonder if that is fixable.

One simply needs the Highlight API. I held back, but now even Firefox ESR supports it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Highlight

All the trickery vanishes and you get first-class CSS support.

And there's an open issue for that already: https://github.com/bearcove/arborium/issues/62

That works on the text inside a textarea? Is there a demo showcasing this somewhere?

There is a neat `inert` html attribute you can use to disable all interactions as well as hide the text from ctrl+f searches. (Sadly Safari is the weird one out, and does not exclude the content from searches.)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

GitHub had to solve the same problem when speeding up there code viewer.

https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/cr...

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