Textarea, You Are A Sunken Nothing

http://web.archive.org/web/20050816051837/http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/2004/05/20.html

by EbFFA • 16 years ago

250 53 16 years ago

web.archive.org

da5e• 16 years ago

Hey they've already added the stretcher in the bottom right corner. That's something.

xinuc• 16 years ago

not in my firefox :(

well, I haven't really thought about it, but, yes, textarea is pretty ugly. and try to make it better (with weird wysiwyg javascript libs) can end up worse. hail _why.

unfletch• 16 years ago

    not in my firefox :(

It's coming in 4.0! They've added support for the CSS "resize" property, and set it to "both" by default. Just like WebKit.

zephjc• 16 years ago

textarea was never meant to be an actual text editor, just a place to input multiple lines of text for forms

derefr2• 16 years ago

But, as an ironic twist, textareas are almost never sighted in the middle of structured input forms. Instead, you get abominations of denormalization like "Address Line 1/Address Line 2".

wvenable3• 16 years ago

Every system your system will ever communicate with has individual fields like that. It's much easier to concatenate an address or name together from separate fields than to split them apart after the fact.

EbFFA• 16 years ago

I should point out the URL of the actual post was w3mIsMyAmbassadorToTheWikis.html, and w3m, a text-based browser, opens up your $EDITOR for you whenever you edit a textarea.

noibl• 16 years ago

Out of sympathy for the Firefox sadface earlier in this thread:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125/

'Edit textareas using an external editor, because it's all text!'

necubi• 16 years ago

If you're on a mac and use Safari, QuickCursor (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor) is a nice free input manager that solves this problem. It lets you use a real text editor (Textmate, BBEdit, Smutron amongst others) in place of a text area. Pressing a hot key opens the text opens the text in your editor, and saving copies it back.

Sadly it doesn't yet work in Chrome, but the chrome team is working on it.

imurray• 16 years ago

For firefox there is "It's all text!"

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125/

(and mozex, which I used to use before that.)

proee• 16 years ago

Is there something like this for Chrome? It's the one thing I've missed making the switch from FF.

mhansen2• 16 years ago

Anything for Chrome on Linux?

hsuresh• 16 years ago

There is Edit with Emacs extension - https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ljobjlafonikaiip...

joelmichael• 16 years ago

If you're using Safari, you can resize the textarea, search within it, scroll the textarea by mousing over it regardless of present field focus, and use emacs key combos like Ctrl-A, E, K, and Y without any additional software.

X-Istence• 16 years ago

Ctrl + K is emacs? As far as I am aware it is available to every program on Unix through readline. See this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_key#Examples

jcdreads• 16 years ago

By editing your ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file you can set up a gigantic subset of emacs navigation keys (including almost-but-not-quite versions of C-k and C-y) in every Cocoa text widget on your computer, including Safari textareas.

Do a search for DefaultKeyBinding.dict, or just start with mine:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5431919/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Wow, I've been looking for something like that for awhile to help my CMS workflow.

I searched all over, but I guess I just couldn't adequately describe what I was looking for to Google.

Naga• 16 years ago

Vimperator does this, too.

binspace• 16 years ago

oh, leave the poor text area alone.

js4all• 16 years ago

The Bespin project has a cool bookmarklet, that replaces every textarea with an instance of Bespin.

threepointone• 16 years ago

I really, really miss _why. He's one of the main reasons I ditched an awful career in the design industry and got back into UI development; I missed coding that much after reading _why.

mitjak• 16 years ago

He's out there somewhere. Along with Elvis.

mahmud• 16 years ago

"Eddie lives, somewhere in time" -- Dark Avenger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger#Dark_Avenger.27s_v...

preek2• 16 years ago

I've got the Vimperator. It lets you use VIM inside Firefox. It will even open textareas inside VIM (Ctrl+i).

Downside: Ctrl+i doesn't work on the Mac. Anyway, it makes my working for the man a little less disgusting.

d4rt• 16 years ago

Works for me with MacVim: http://phaseportrait.blogspot.com/2008/12/making-macvim-work...

preek2• 16 years ago

Thx a bunch. It's been some time since I last tried to get it to work, but now it magically does (thanks to your blogpost^^).

Anyway, I'm not using the -f flag. If I do, MacVim won't push the data into the textarea. It works with :x Cmd+q, though.

Thanks again. That will be a great timesaver in the years to come(;

timinman• 16 years ago

I was thinking, "Hey, this writing style reminds me of _why! Has _why come out of retirement?" Then I scrolled up to see that it was an archive of his old site.

jpcx01• 16 years ago

6 years and it hasn't really changed.

We have a 4 way browser war, yet no one wants to improve the basic textarea. W T F

mhansen2• 16 years ago

Hey, Chrome lets you expand it with a resizer on the corner. That's something

Herald_MJ• 16 years ago

Actually, that's Webkit. Been in Safari for looooong before Chrome.

sp332• 16 years ago

Firefox 4.0 will have that, it's working in the beta now.

sprout• 16 years ago

Point of fact, on modern browsers textarea is better than notepad. You have spellcheck, and the standard range of move/delete by word commands, and undo.

angelbob2• 16 years ago

And yet Chrome, presumably among the most modern of browsers, still doesn't have search/replace that works in a textarea.

someone_here• 16 years ago

Find works in Firefox.

amberingrid• 16 years ago

If you've ever tried to build/work on a text area replacement, you'll know that it is an insanely difficult task. Highlighting and manipulating text sounds fairly rudimentary, but each version of each browser has enough bugs to keep a deveoper occupied for weeks with little to show. (I speek from experience.)

I think Google might have the right idea; the new version of gdocs completely ignores the browser's built-in (broken) selection and editing abilities and instead uses pure JavaScript listening for mouse and key events.

doki_pen• 16 years ago

I've often dreamed of an embedded vi in my browser. Oh how many times I have hit <esc> and wiped out what I spent 15 minutes typing!

koenigdavidmj• 16 years ago

http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

Vimperator?

palish• 16 years ago

Chrome has the ability to resize textareas by click-dragging the lower-right corner: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/chrome_textareas.png

GrandMasterBirt• 16 years ago

I feel this poem has not been upvoted enough. If this does not reach 1000 upvotes in the next few days you are a disgrace to the interwebs!

Textarea, You Are A Sunken Nothing

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