TextEdit QML Type

Sets the horizontal and vertical alignment of the text within the TextEdit item's width and height. By default, the text alignment follows the natural alignment of the text, for example text that is read from left to right will be aligned to the left.

Valid values for horizontalAlignment are:

Valid values for verticalAlignment are:

When using the attached property LayoutMirroring::enabled to mirror application layouts, the horizontal alignment of text will also be mirrored. However, the property horizontalAlignment will remain unchanged. To query the effective horizontal alignment of TextEdit, use the read-only property effectiveHorizontalAlignment.

These properties hold the padding around the content. This space is reserved in addition to the contentWidth and contentHeight.

Whether the TextEdit should gain active focus on a mouse press. By default this is set to true.

This property specifies a base URL which is used to resolve relative URLs within the text.

The default value is the url of the QML file instantiating the TextEdit item.

Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and the content of the clipboard is suitable for pasting into the TextEdit.

Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and there are undone operations that can be redone.

Returns true if the TextEdit is writable and there are previous operations that can be undone.

The text color.

// green text using hexadecimal notation
TextEdit { color: "#00FF00" }

// steelblue text using SVG color name
TextEdit { color: "steelblue" }

Returns the height of the text, including the height past the height that is covered if the text does not fit within the set height.

Returns the width of the text, including the width past the width which is covered due to insufficient wrapping if wrapMode is set.

The delegate for the cursor in the TextEdit.

If you set a cursorDelegate for a TextEdit, this delegate will be used for drawing the cursor instead of the standard cursor. An instance of the delegate will be created and managed by the text edit when a cursor is needed, and the x and y properties of delegate instance will be set so as to be one pixel before the top left of the current character.

Note that the root item of the delegate component must be a QQuickItem or QQuickItem derived item.

The position of the cursor in the TextEdit. The cursor is positioned between characters.

The rectangle where the standard text cursor is rendered within the text edit. Read-only.

The position and height of a custom cursorDelegate are updated to follow the cursorRectangle automatically when it changes. The width of the delegate is unaffected by changes in the cursor rectangle.

This property is under development and is subject to change.

This property is an object that provides properties of the text that is currently selected, if any, alongside the text cursor.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.7.

See also selectedText, selectionStart, and selectionEnd.

If true the text edit shows a cursor.

This property is set and unset when the text edit gets active focus, but it can also be set directly (useful, for example, if a KeyProxy might forward keys to it).

Sets whether the font weight is bold.

Sets the capitalization for the text.

TextEdit { text: "Hello"; font.capitalization: Font.AllLowercase }

If the selected font does not contain a certain character, Qt automatically chooses a similar-looking fallback font that contains the character. By default this is done on a character-by-character basis.

This means that in certain uncommon cases, many different fonts may be used to represent one string of text even if it's in the same script. Setting contextFontMerging to true will try finding the fallback font that matches the largest subset of the input string instead. This will be more expensive for strings where missing glyphs occur, but may give more consistent results. By default, contextFontMerging is false.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.8.

See also QFont::StyleStrategy.

Sets the family name of the font.

The family name is case insensitive and may optionally include a foundry name, e.g. "Helvetica [Cronyx]". If the family is available from more than one foundry and the foundry isn't specified, an arbitrary foundry is chosen. If the family isn't available a family will be set using the font matching algorithm.

Applies integer values to specific OpenType features when shaping the text based on the contents in features. This provides advanced access to the font shaping process, and can be used to support font features that are otherwise not covered in the API.

The font features are represented by a map from four-letter tags to integer values. This integer value passed along with the tag in most cases represents a boolean value: A zero value means the feature is disabled, and a non-zero value means it is enabled. For certain font features, however, it may have other interpretations. For example, when applied to the salt feature, the value is an index that specifies the stylistic alternative to use.

For example, the frac font feature will convert diagonal fractions separated with a slash (such as 1/2) with a different representation. Typically this will involve baking the full fraction into a single character width (such as ½).

If a font supports the frac feature, then it can be enabled in the shaper as in the following code:

Text {
    text: "One divided by two is 1/2"
    font.family: "MyFractionFont"
    font.features: { "frac": 1 }
}

Multiple features can be assigned values in the same mapping. For instance, if you would like to also disable kerning for the font, you can explicitly disable this as follows:

Text {
    text: "One divided by two is 1/2"
    font.family: "MyFractionFont"
    font.features: { "frac": 1, "kern": 0 }
}

You can also collect the font properties in an object:

Text {
    text: "One divided by two is 1/2"
    font: {
        family: "MyFractionFont"
        features: { "frac": 1, "kern": 0 }
    }
}

This property was introduced in Qt 6.6.

See also QFont::setFeature().

Sets the preferred hinting on the text. This is a hint to the underlying text rendering system to use a certain level of hinting, and has varying support across platforms. See the table in the documentation for QFont::HintingPreference for more details.

TextEdit { text: "Hello"; renderType: TextEdit.NativeRendering; font.hintingPreference: Font.PreferVerticalHinting }

Sets whether the font has an italic style.

Enables or disables the kerning OpenType feature when shaping the text. Disabling this may improve performance when creating or changing the text, at the expense of some cosmetic features. The default value is true.

TextEdit { text: "OATS FLAVOUR WAY"; kerning: font.false }

Sets the letter spacing for the font.

Letter spacing changes the default spacing between individual letters in the font. A positive value increases the letter spacing by the corresponding pixels; a negative value decreases the spacing.

Sets the font size in pixels.

Using this function makes the font device dependent. Use TextEdit::font.pointSize to set the size of the font in a device independent manner.

Sets the font size in points. The point size must be greater than zero.

Sometimes, a font will apply complex rules to a set of characters in order to display them correctly. In some writing systems, such as Brahmic scripts, this is required in order for the text to be legible, but in e.g. Latin script, it is merely a cosmetic feature. Setting the preferShaping property to false will disable all such features when they are not required, which will improve performance in most cases.

The default value is true.

TextEdit { text: "Some text"; font.preferShaping: false }

competing sets of the vertical line metrics that provide the ascent, descent and leading of the font. These are often referred to as the win (Windows) metrics and the typo (typographical) metrics. While the specification recommends using the typo metrics for line spacing, many applications prefer the win metrics unless the USE_TYPO_METRICS flag is set in the fsSelection field of the font. For backwards-compatibility reasons, this is also the case for Qt applications. This is not an issue for fonts that set the USE_TYPO_METRICS flag to indicate that the typo metrics are valid, nor for fonts where the win metrics and typo metrics match up. However, for certain fonts the win metrics may be larger than the preferable line spacing and the USE_TYPO_METRICS flag may be unset by mistake. For such fonts, setting font.preferTypoLineMetrics may give superior results.

By default, preferTypoLineMetrics is false.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.8.

See also QFont::StyleStrategy.

Sets whether the font has a strikeout style.

Sets the style name of the font.

The style name is case insensitive. If set, the font will be matched against style name instead of the font properties font.weight, font.bold and font.italic.

Sets whether the text is underlined.

Applies floating point values to variable axes in variable fonts.

Variable fonts provide a way to store multiple variations (with different weights, widths or styles) in the same font file. The variations are given as floating point values for a pre-defined set of parameters, called "variable axes". Specific instances are typically given names by the font designer, and, in Qt, these can be selected using setStyleName() just like traditional sub-families.

In some cases, it is also useful to provide arbitrary values for the different axes. For instance, if a font has a Regular and Bold sub-family, you may want a weight in-between these. You could then manually request this by supplying a custom value for the "wght" axis in the font.

Text {
    text: "Foobar"
    font.family: "MyVariableFont"
    font.variableAxes: { "wght": (Font.Normal + Font.Bold) / 2.0 }
}

If the "wght" axis is supported by the font and the given value is within its defined range, a font corresponding to the weight 550.0 will be provided.

There are a few standard axes than many fonts provide, such as "wght" (weight), "wdth" (width), "ital" (italic) and "opsz" (optical size). They each have indivdual ranges defined in the font itself. For instance, "wght" may span from 100 to 900 (QFont::Thin to QFont::Black) whereas "ital" can span from 0 to 1 (from not italic to fully italic).

A font may also choose to define custom axes; the only limitation is that the name has to meet the requirements for a QFont::Tag (sequence of four latin-1 characters.)

By default, no variable axes are set.

This property was introduced in Qt 6.7.

See also QFont::setVariableAxis().

The requested weight of the font. The weight requested must be an integer between 1 and 1000, or one of the predefined values:

TextEdit { text: "Hello"; font.weight: Font.DemiBold }

Sets the word spacing for the font.

Word spacing changes the default spacing between individual words. A positive value increases the word spacing by a corresponding amount of pixels, while a negative value decreases the inter-word spacing accordingly.

This property contains the link string when the user hovers a link embedded in the text. The link must be in rich text or HTML format and the link string provides access to the particular link.

See also linkHovered and linkAt().

This property holds whether the TextEdit has partial text input from an input method.

While it is composing an input method may rely on mouse or key events from the TextEdit to edit or commit the partial text. This property can be used to determine when to disable events handlers that may interfere with the correct operation of an input method.

Provides hints to the input method about the expected content of the text edit and how it should operate.

The value is a bit-wise combination of flags or Qt.ImhNone if no hints are set.

Flags that alter behaviour are:

Flags that restrict input (exclusive flags) are:

Masks:

Returns the total number of plain text characters in the TextEdit item.

As this number doesn't include any formatting markup it may not be the same as the length of the string returned by the text property.

This property can be faster than querying the length the text property as it doesn't require any copying or conversion of the TextEdit's internal string data.

Returns the total number of lines in the TextEdit item.

Specifies how text should be selected using a mouse.

This property only applies when selectByMouse is true.

Whether text entered by the user will overwrite existing text.

As with many text editors, the text editor widget can be configured to insert or overwrite existing text with new text entered by the user.

If this property is true, existing text is overwritten, character-for-character by new text; otherwise, text is inserted at the cursor position, displacing existing text.

By default, this property is false (new text does not overwrite existing text).

Whether the TextEdit should keep the selection visible when it loses active focus to another item in the scene. By default this is set to false.

This property contains partial text input from an input method.

To turn off partial text that results from predictions, set the Qt.ImhNoPredictiveText flag in inputMethodHints.

See also inputMethodHints.

Whether the user can interact with the TextEdit item. If this property is set to true the text cannot be edited by user interaction.

By default this property is false.

Override the default rendering type for this component.

Supported render types are:

Select TextEdit.NativeRendering if you prefer text to look native on the target platform and do not require advanced features such as transformation of the text. Using such features in combination with the NativeRendering render type will lend poor and sometimes pixelated results.

Both TextEdit.QtRendering and TextEdit.CurveRendering are hardware-accelerated techniques. QtRendering is the faster of the two, but uses more memory and will exhibit rendering artifacts at large sizes. CurveRendering should be considered as an alternative in cases where QtRendering does not give good visual results or where reducing graphics memory consumption is a priority.

The default rendering type is determined by QQuickWindow::textRenderType().

Defaults to true when the editor is editable, and false when read-only.

If true, the user can use the keyboard to select text even if the editor is read-only. If false, the user cannot use the keyboard to select text even if the editor is editable.

See also readOnly.

Defaults to true since Qt 6.4.

If true, the user can use the mouse to select text in the usual way.

This read-only property provides the text currently selected in the text edit.

It is equivalent to the following snippet, but is faster and easier to use.

//myTextEdit is the id of the TextEdit
myTextEdit.text.toString().substring(myTextEdit.selectionStart,
        myTextEdit.selectionEnd);

The selected text color, used in selections.

The text highlight color, used behind selections.

The cursor position after the last character in the current selection.

This property is read-only. To change the selection, use select(start,end), selectAll(), or selectWord().

See also selectionStart, cursorPosition, and selectedText.

The cursor position before the first character in the current selection.

This property is read-only. To change the selection, use select(start,end), selectAll(), or selectWord().

See also selectionEnd, cursorPosition, and selectedText.

The default distance, in device units, between tab stops.

See also QTextOption::setTabStopDistance().

The text to display. If the text format is AutoText the text edit will automatically determine whether the text should be treated as rich text. This determination is made using Qt::mightBeRichText(). However, detection of Markdown is not automatic.

The text-property is mostly suitable for setting the initial content and handling modifications to relatively small text content. The append(), insert() and remove() methods provide more fine-grained control and remarkably better performance for modifying especially large rich text content.

Note that some keyboards use a predictive function. In this case, the text being composed by the input method is not part of this property. The part of the text related to the predictions is underlined and stored in the preeditText property.

If you used TextDocument::source to load text, you can retrieve the loaded text from this property. In that case, you can then change textFormat to do format conversions that will change the value of the text property. For example, if textFormat is RichText or AutoText and you load an HTML file, then set textFormat to MarkdownText afterwards, the text property will contain the conversion from HTML to Markdown.

See also clear(), preeditText, and textFormat.

Returns the QQuickTextDocument of this TextEdit. Since Qt 6.7, it has features for loading and saving files. It can also be used in C++ as a means of accessing the underlying QTextDocument instance, for example to install a QSyntaxHighlighter.

See also QQuickTextDocument.

The way the text property should be displayed.

Supported text formats are:

The default is TextEdit.PlainText. If the text format is set to TextEdit.AutoText, the text edit will automatically determine whether the text should be treated as rich text. If the text property is set, this determination is made using Qt::mightBeRichText(), which can detect the presence of an HTML tag on the first line of text, but cannot distinguish Markdown from plain text. If the TextDocument::source property is set, this determination is made from the mime type of the file.

Column {
    TextEdit {
        font.pointSize: 24
        textFormat: TextEdit.AutoText
        text: "<b>Hello</b> <i>World!</i>"
    }
    TextEdit {
        font.pointSize: 24
        textFormat: TextEdit.RichText
        text: "<b>Hello</b> <i>World!</i>"
    }
    TextEdit {
        font.pointSize: 24
        textFormat: TextEdit.PlainText
        text: "<b>Hello</b> <i>World!</i>"
    }
    TextEdit {
        font.pointSize: 24
        textFormat: TextEdit.MarkdownText
        text: "**Hello** *World!*"
    }
}

With TextEdit.MarkdownText, checkboxes that result from using the GitHub checkbox extension are interactively checkable.

If the TextDocument::source property is set, changing the textFormat property after loading has the effect of converting from the detected format to the requested format. For example, you can convert between HTML and Markdown. However if either of those "rich" formats is loaded and then you set textFormat to PlainText, the TextEdit will show the raw markup. Thus, suitable bindings (e.g. to a checkable Control) can enable the user to toggle back and forth between "raw" and WYSIWYG editing.

• code blocks use the default monospace font but without a surrounding highlight box
• block quotes are indented, but there is no vertical line alongside the quote

The margin, in pixels, around the text in the TextEdit.

Set this property to wrap the text to the TextEdit item's width. The text will only wrap if an explicit width has been set.

The default is TextEdit.NoWrap. If you set a width, consider using TextEdit.Wrap.

This signal is emitted when the text edit loses focus.

This signal is emitted when the user clicks on a link embedded in the text. The link must be in rich text or HTML format and the link string provides access to the particular link.

This signal is emitted when the user hovers a link embedded in the text. The link must be in rich text or HTML format and the link string provides access to the particular link.

See also hoveredLink and linkAt().

This signal is emitted whenever the text is edited. Unlike textChanged(), this signal is not emitted when the text is changed programmatically, for example, by changing the value of the text property or by calling clear().

This signal was introduced in Qt 6.9.

Appends a new paragraph with text to the end of the TextEdit.

In order to append without inserting a new paragraph, call myTextEdit.insert(myTextEdit.length, text) instead.

Clears the contents of the text edit and resets partial text input from an input method.

Use this method instead of setting the text property to an empty string.

See also QInputMethod::reset().

Copies the currently selected text to the system clipboard.

Moves the currently selected text to the system clipboard.

Removes active text selection.

Returns the section of text that is between the start and end positions.

The returned text will be formatted according the textFormat property.

Returns the section of text that is between the start and end positions.

The returned text does not include any rich text formatting.

Inserts text into the TextEdit at position.

Returns true if the natural reading direction of the editor text found between positions start and end is right to left.

Returns the link string at point x, y in content coordinates, or an empty string if no link exists at that point.

See also hoveredLink.

Moves the cursor to position and updates the selection according to the optional mode parameter. (To only move the cursor, set the cursorPosition property.)

When this method is called it additionally sets either the selectionStart or the selectionEnd (whichever was at the previous cursor position) to the specified position. This allows you to easily extend and contract the selected text range.

The selection mode specifies whether the selection is updated on a per character or a per word basis. If not specified the selection mode will default to TextEdit.SelectCharacters.

For example, take this sequence of calls:

cursorPosition = 5
moveCursorSelection(9, TextEdit.SelectCharacters)
moveCursorSelection(7, TextEdit.SelectCharacters)

This moves the cursor to position 5, extend the selection end from 5 to 9 and then retract the selection end from 9 to 7, leaving the text from position 5 to 7 selected (the 6th and 7th characters).

The same sequence with TextEdit.SelectWords will extend the selection start to a word boundary before or on position 5 and extend the selection end to a word boundary on or past position 9.

Replaces the currently selected text by the contents of the system clipboard.

Returns the text position closest to pixel position (x, y).

Position 0 is before the first character, position 1 is after the first character but before the second, and so on until position text.length, which is after all characters.

Returns the rectangle at the given position in the text. The x, y, and height properties correspond to the cursor that would describe that position.

Redoes the last operation if redo is available.

Removes the section of text that is between the start and end positions from the TextEdit.

Causes the text from start to end to be selected.

If either start or end is out of range, the selection is not changed.

After calling this, selectionStart will become the lesser and selectionEnd will become the greater (regardless of the order passed to this method).

See also selectionStart and selectionEnd.

Causes all text to be selected.

Causes the word closest to the current cursor position to be selected.

Undoes the last operation if undo is available. Deselects any current selection, and updates the selection start to the current cursor position.