QTextLayout / QTextLine support grouping of several-characters so it acts as one character for the cursor - qt

Question

Is it possible for QTextLayout to render several characters, but to process/handle it as one character. For example rendering a code point like: [U+202e], and when moving the caret/calculating positions, it is treated as one character.
Edited:
Please check this following issue, were I explain what I'm trying to do. It for the edbee Qt component. It's using QTextLayout for line rendering.
https://github.com/edbee/edbee-lib/issues/127
Possibly it isn't possible with QTextLayout, the documentation is quite limited.

Answer 1

According to Qt docs:
"The class has a rather low level API and unless you intend to implement your own text rendering for some specialized widget, you probably won't need to use it directly." - https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtextlayout.html#details
You should probably use a QLineEdit or a QTextEdit (each has a method called setReadOnly(bool)).
Before answering the question, I will point out that the CursorMode enum (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtextlayout.html#CursorMode-enum) seems very promising for this problem, but to me, the documentation isn't clear on how to use it or set it.
Now to answer your question in regards to QLineEdit or QTextEdit, it's a bit complicated, but it's the same for QLineEdit and QTextEdit, so lets look at QTextEdit.
Firstly, mouse clicks: QTextEdit has a signal called cursorPositionChanged(), which will be helpful here. You'll want to connect that to a custom slot, which can make use of the function moveCursor(QTextCursor::MoveOperation operation, QTextCursor::MoveMode mode = QTextCursor::MoveAnchor) (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtextedit.html#moveCursor). Notice that there are very helpful enumeration values for you here in QTextCursor::MoveOperation regarding word hopping (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtextcursor.html#MoveOperation-enum). How do we put all of this together? Well, probably the right way to do it is to determine the width of the chars to the left of the cursor's position and the width of the chars to the right of the cursor's position when the cursorPositionChanged() signal is emitted and go to the side of the word that has less width. However, I'm not sure how to do that. At this point I'd settle with checking the number of chars to the left and right and going to the side with less.
Secondly, keyboard presses: This goes a bit out of my knowledge, but almost everything drawable and iteractable inherits from QWidget. Take a look at https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html#keyPressEvent and it's possible that overriding that in your own implementation of QTextEdit is necessary to get the left arrow and right arrow keypresses to jump words (once you get that part it's pretty easy, just use the same function as last section for moving the cursor, or in the case of QLineEdit, cursorWordForward()/cursorWordBackward()).
All this being said, I've so far been assuming that you're not deleting anything or selecting anything. Selection can be a real pain depending on if you allow multiple selections, but the functions are all there in the documentation to implement those things.
Example of mouse click impl:
myclass.hpp
#include <QTextEdit>
#include <QTextCursor>
#include <QObject>
#include <QString>
int distance_to_word_beginning_or_end(const QString &str, int index, bool beginning);
class MyClass {
MyClass();
~MyClass();
private:
QTextEdit *text_edit;
public slots:
void text_edit_changed_cursor_location();
};
myclass.cpp
#include "myclass.hpp"
int distance_to_word_beginning_or_end(const QString &str, int index, bool beginning)
{
// return the distance from the beginning or end of the word from the index given
int inc_or_dec = (beginning) ? -1 : 1;
int distance = 0;
while (index >= 0 && index < str.length())
{
if (str.at(index) == ' ' || str.at(index) == '\n' || str.at(index) == '\t')
{
return distance;
}
distance++;
index += inc_or_dec;
}
return --distance;
}
MyClass::MyClass()
{
text_edit = new QTextEdit();
QObject::connect(text_edit, &QTextEdit::cursorPositionChanged, this, &MyClass::text_edit_changed_cursor_location);
}
MyClass::~MyClass()
{
delete text_edit;
}
void MyClass::text_edit_changed_cursor_location()
{
QString text_edit_string = text_edit->text();
QTextCursor text_edit_cursor = text_edit->textCursor();
auto current_position = text_edit_cursor.position();
QTextCursor new_text_cursor;
int distance_to_beginning = distance_to_word_beginning_or_end(text_edit_string, current_position, true);
int distance_to_end = distance_to_word_beginning_or_end(text_edit_string, current_position, false);
auto movement_type;
if (distance_to_beginning > distance_to_end)
{
new_text_cursor.setPosition(current_position + distance_to_end);
} else {
new_text_cursor.setPosition(current_position - distance_to_beginning);
}
text_edit->setTextCursor(new_text_cursor);
}