Built in Angular Directives

If you do a search for Angular directives most of the hits you get will be on how to write your own. Of course at some point you will want to do this. However Angular has many builtin directives ready for us to use.

So what are directives? The docs have this to say

Angular comes with a built in set of directives which are useful for building web applications but can be extended such that HTML can be turned into a declarative domain specific language (DSL).

If you look at the Angular docs on directives you'll see that it mostly talks about writing directives and the mechanics of how directives work. However if you look at the API docs you'll see many directives listed that are part of the framework. What I think is surprising about this set of directives is that as well as the ng* set of directives that augment the DOM, such as ngRepeat and ngClick, there are directives that replace standard HTML elements such as 'a' and 'input'. Obviously Angular is doing a lot of work under the covers to make our lives easier.