Cannot manually change text?

[mcclure]

This is either a feature request or a support request, I'm not sure.
I believe I need some way to make actual changes to lines(), IE I have a new lines() and I want to replace the old one. I don't think this exists now.

For example, see this¹ fork of your vim example. In this code (branch ami-wv-cat, commit 1443d7f, line 1068) I have added support for the :!cat command from vim (read an entire file, paste it in at the cursor position). To do this I generate a new lines(), but I don't have a way to insert it into the Textarea once I've made it.

Things I've considered:

• Use TextArea::new() and supply the new lines(). This doesn't work because of private members I can't access: Scroll is reset and also I lose the undo buffer.
• cut() the old selection away, then put the data in the yank buffer and paste() it. I rejected this because it would stomp the contents of the yank buffer. Actually, I guess I could have copied out the yank buffer, saved it, performed the operation and then restored the yank buffer. But this has other problems: It's less convenient when you're replacing the entire file, like imagine you modified the entire file to uppercase; and it runs into issue Feature request: Should be possible to manipulate (collapse, censor) "Undo" stack items #90 (e.g. it will show up as two steps to the undo stack).

Is there an option I'm missing?

Should there maybe be a function like
textarea.set_lines(lines, clear_styles)?

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¹ This is a WIP and currently not "public", I would submit the nascent : support back to tui-textarea but I don't think it would make as good example code as what you have now.