Building a Web Editor with React and Monaco Editor

What is Monaco Editor?

Monaco Editor is a browser-based code editor developed by Microsoft, widely used in popular products such as VS Code, Azure DevOps, and Visual Studio Online. It provides a fast and efficient coding experience, featuring syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and support for various programming languages and technologies.

Getting Started with React and Monaco Editor

To build our web editor, we’ll start by creating a new React app using the create-react-app command. Next, we’ll install the react-monaco-editor package, which provides a React component for the Monaco Editor.

npx create-react-app my-web-editor
cd my-web-editor
npm install react-monaco-editor

Configuring the Editor

After installing the required packages, we’ll configure the editor by passing options to the MonacoEditor component. This can include setting the font size, font family, cursor style, and more.

import { MonacoEditor } from 'react-monaco-editor';

const editorOptions = {
  fontSize: 14,
  fontFamily: 'Consolas',
  cursorStyle: 'block'
};

function MyEditor() {
  return (
    <MonacoEditor
      height="500"
      language="javascript"
      theme="vs-dark"
      options={editorOptions}
    />
  );
}

Opening Files in the Editor

To make our editor more useful, we’ll add the ability to open files from the local machine. We’ll use the useState hook to manage the file state and create a function to handle file changes.

import { useState } from 'react';
import { MonacoEditor } from