[jarek-foksa]

I'm rather skeptical about text editors implemented on top of the canvas element. Mozilla has already tried that with Bespin project and it failed miserably (huge code base, poor performance, limited accessibility).

Wouldn't it be easier to just use div element with contentEditable attribute? Currently contentEditable has limited API and a lot of inconstancies across browsers, but in the longer run it seems to be the way to go: http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2011-08-31/future-editing-web

[geocar]

contentEditable isn't very cross-platform, comes with its own set of keybindings, and it's difficult to decorate the text you're working on as you type without glitching things.

I'm also skeptical about canvas, so when I implemented my own jsvi years ago (at http://src.internetconnection.net/vi and now at http://geocar.sdf1.org/vi ) I didn't use canvas. It works everywhere but chrome (which won't let me capture escape), and it produces the same results all the way back to MSIE6.

In retrospect, I would've had an easier time overriding keystrokes on a textarea.