jquery.haircut.js

We've got plenty of long filenames in the LayerVault file dashboard. We needed a way to condense them to fit into the interface while still displaying important parts (like the file extension). Thus, Haircut was born.

Haircut will ellipsize a string of text to fit inside of its parent container without overflowing or breaking to another line.

You can see a video of it in action here: Haircut in Action.

When hovering over a piece of text that's been given a haircut, the full text is display in a nice bubble. This bubble can be styled to the user's desire. Haircut is smart enough to pull out and include anchor tags contained within ellipsized text.

Setup

First, include haircut on the page. Bonus points for rolling it into your asset pipeline.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.haircut.js"></script>

Next, select the items on the page you want to haircut.

$(function () {
  $('.Filename').haircut();
});

Next, you will need to call the method stringResize whenever your layout changes. This has been abstracted out for now so that users can use things like the Underscore throttle and debounce methods. It's highly recommended that you use these if you've got a heavy page.

$(window).resize(function () {
  $('.Filename').stringResize();
});

Configuration

Haircut has a few configuration parameters that will help with tweaking performance and deciding which part of the string get ellipsized. Set the options like so:

  $('.Filename').haircut({
    // The more haircut items on the page, the more it jitters during animation.
    // Adding padding reduces jitter but gives you less usable space.
    jitterPadding     : 30,

    // The placement of the ellipsis. Can be "beginning", "middle" or "end"
    // Defaults to "middle"
    placement         : "middle"
  });

Styling

To change the styling of the hover bubble, you will need to provide stylings for the classes ._LVshowHaircutExpand and ._LVhaircutExpand. You can see example CSS rules on the test page of this project.

Authors

Written by Allan Grinshtein and Kelly Sutton for LayerVault. More open-source projects are available in the LayerVault Cosmos. Licensed under the MIT License.