On this page
  1. Quickstart
  2. Advanced features
  3. Other Cool Stuff
    1. Statement
    2. Pulse
    3. Catalyst
    4. Whisper
    5. Echo

Quill icon

Let your players write with ease

Quill is an advanced text input library for GameMaker. It’s designed to be fast, easy to use and give you all the features a user expects when they encounter a textbox. This includes things like: caret movement, selection, clipboard, undo/redo, labels, right-click context menus, validation messaging, and proper theming, amongst many others.

Start here: Getting Started -> Usage Guide -> Theming Guide -> API Reference

Quickstart

Create a text box, and bind it to a struct member variable (more on this later):

// Create event
profile = { name: "" };

name_box = QuillSingle("Name", "Enter your name")
	.BindText(profile, "name")

Then draw it every frame in Draw GUI:

// Draw GUI event
name_box.Draw(24, 24, 320);
QuillDrawOverlays();

By simply doing that, you get a fully functional text box that users can type in, select their text with either mouse or keyboard, right click to get a context menu, and do essentially everything they’ve come to expect from a textbox.

Advanced features

Quill also comes with a ton of advanced features, like multi-line text boxes, tab focus jumps, a variety of filtering presets for textboxes (such as password, code, path, etc), interaction hooks (OnFocus, OnChange, etc), the ability to add or remove items from the right-click context menu per-textbox, and a lot more.

Other Cool Stuff

If you like Quill, then be sure to check out my other libraries:

Statement icon

Statement

An easy to use state manager that comes packed with a lot of awesome features.

Pulse icon

Pulse

A signals & queries manager that allows you to easily uncouple dependencies and simplify your code.

Catalyst icon

Catalyst

An extremely powerful stat manager, allowing you to quickly build stats for your games (such as attack power, or jump height) that can be easily modified and altered in a variety of ways.

Whisper icon

Whisper

A narrative manager that allows you to create complex, dynamic storytelling by providing simple rules that sit along your dialog/story. The roguelite “Hades” famous reactive storytelling is an example of what Whisper can help you do.

Echo icon

Echo

A debug manager that comes with a very fully featured Debug UI builder (in fact, Quill comes directly from the textboxes in Echo)

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