[Feature Request]: Backport "Add setSelectionRange to PromptInput" to Textarea component

[purplepenguin2]

Description

There was a recent commit that exposed the setSelectionRange to PromptInput, but it'd be extremely useful to expose it on the Textarea component as well.

I'd also request exposing the selectionStart and selectionEnd values as well, since without them, the set method itself isn't super useful.

Code of Conduct

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• I checked the current issues for duplicate requests

[gethinwebster]

Could you let us know more about your use-case for this? Previous use-cases we've seen haven't needed the selectionStart/End values, so I'm interested to better understand what exactly you're trying to achieve, to make sure this is the best approach.

[purplepenguin2]

Without being able to read the current values, it makes it impossible to keep a persistent cursor after modifying values. For an example, I'm using the Textarea component as a very simple/minimal code editor, so Tab needs to insert 2 spaces, not move the focus to another element. In order to achieve that, I need to update the component's value, then take the current cursor position and add 2 to it, etc.

There's limited value in only being able to blindly set a new selection range while not being able to access to current selection at all. Currently I need to wrap the Textarea component in a div so I can get a ref to the actual DOM element, which is not ideal. If Cloudscape offered some type of escape hatch to at least access the bare DOM element, you wouldn't need to support selectionStart and selectionEnd specifically, but right now, it's impossible to pass a ref or access the DOM element itself, so it makes use cases like tab to insert a space very difficult and require extra boilerplate/wrapper code.

[gethinwebster]

If you're building a code editor I think you would be better starting with native components and styling them using design tokens, as this is quite a bit beyond the expected use-cases of the textarea component. Recreating the styling should be relatively straightforward as the component itself is not too complex (https://github.com/cloudscape-design/components/blob/main/src/textarea/index.tsx), and this would then give you complete control.