SilentMac Design

November 20th, 2008, 82

Ever wished you had the ability to tab inside a textarea in your browser? We all have at one point or another: it’d make typing code a whole lot easier. Sure, you can get something like Tabinta, but that requires Firefox, and is a whole extension to install.

A few weeks ago I set out to write a little javascript bookmarklet to solve this problem, and on the whole it was quite successful. It works in all modern browsers (yes, that even includes IE). Here’s the result:

To test the bookmarklet, just click the above button, scroll down to the comment form, and press tab. The tab character (”\t”) should be inserted at your cursor.

And that’s it! You can drag the button into your bookmarks bar to save it. I have it third in the bar, so pressing cmd-3 on any page will run the script, and all textareas on that page will now have the ability to insert tabs.

More later,
-Joe

Tags: characters, insert, javascript, js, script, tab, textarea, useful

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Code, Random, Scripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.