László Kozma

Text box editor [more ideas]

Entering long text in text boxes on web pages is a nuisance. Many common features that are standard in text editors are missing, or implemented differently in various browsers. Familiar key combinations trigger different actions. While text search usually works, there's rarely a replace, and even if there were, it doesn't compare to the regular expression matching of more powerful editors.

While in recent browsers there is spell checking, it's usually difficult to configure and it is English-only. In the extreme case when one has to enter code snippets in a browser text box, TAB moves the focus out of the text box, there is no auto-align, autocomplete, syntax highlighting, indication of matching pairs of parentheses or brackets.

The worst of all is the expiry of a page while filling in a web form, when often all the entered data is lost. An extension would allow to save it in memory and to recover if needed.

One solution would be to extend the functionality of the HTML textbox, leaving it to web developers to use the improved version on their pages. There are several word-processor-like plugins such as FCKeditor, these are meant for a different problem. The better solution to achieve consistency between different sites and to allow users to personalize the editor, is to implement this as a browser plugin. Ideally it would transform the text box on a web page to a lite version of emacs or vi or some other editor. Does such a thing exist already?