Making AvalonEdit MVVM compatible

Question

I\'m trying to make Avalon MVVM compatible in my WPF application. From googling, I found out that AvalonEdit is not MVVM friendly and I need to export the state of AvalonEdi

Answer 1

Not sure if this fits your needs, but I found a way to access all the "important" components of the TextEditor on a ViewModel while having it displayed on a View, still exploring the possibilities though.

What I did was instead of instantiating the TextEditor on the View and then binding the many properties that I will need, I created a Content Control and bound its content to a TextEditor instance that I create in the ViewModel.

View:

ViewModel:

using ICSharpCode.AvalonEdit;
using ICSharpCode.AvalonEdit.Document;
using ICSharpCode.AvalonEdit.Highlighting;
// ...
private TextEditor m_AvalonEditor = new TextEditor();
public TextEditor AvalonEditor => m_AvalonEditor;

Test code in the ViewModel (works!)

// tests with the main component
m_AvalonEditor.SyntaxHighlighting = HighlightingManager.Instance.GetDefinition("XML");
m_AvalonEditor.ShowLineNumbers = true;
m_AvalonEditor.Load(@"C:\testfile.xml");

// test with Options
m_AvalonEditor.Options.HighlightCurrentLine = true;

// test with Text Area
m_AvalonEditor.TextArea.Opacity = 0.5;

// test with Document
m_AvalonEditor.Document.Text += "bla";

At the moment I am still deciding exactly what I need my application to configure/do with the textEditor but from these tests it seems I can change any property from it while keeping a MVVM approach.