One of my pet peeves is small textarea boxes. Although this is a general problem, it applies to the Perl Monks site too. The box I'm currently typing this in is 60x10 chars, while my home computer of 23 years ago could manage 80x25. Is there really any good reason for having such a small box? Yes sure I can compose things in a real text editor then cut+paste, but then I do a preview, need to do a quick change, and, arrgggh.....

Dave.

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Re: Compose box too small
by bmann (Priest) on Jun 01, 2004 at 23:36 UTC
    From my "On-Site CSS Markup" on the User Settings page:

    textarea {
    width: 100%;
    height: 25em;
}

    [download]

    Feel free to adjust to suit your tastes. The textarea I'm typing in right now holds around 16 lines of Courier New 10pt, and the width is resized whenever I resize my browser window.

    Much, much more can be found at PerlMonks CSS Examples

    Update: added the '{'. Thanks to The Mad Hatter

[reply]
[d/l]

      Personallized CSS is a wonderful thing, but If I remember correctly, some browsers won't recognize CSS width/height attributes on textareas if said textareas are defined with "rows" and "cols" attributes (which the PM textareas are).

      I've never really minded the size of the textarea, but now that it's been pointed out, and given the push to make PM more CSS based, it seems like switching the textarea sizing to use CSS for sizing would be a good idea. and the example you listed seems like a good site default.

[reply]
        If I remember correctly, some browsers won't recognize CSS width/height attributes on textareas if said textareas are defined with "rows" and "cols" attributes
        Could be. All I know is that I've used it with IE 6, Mozilla (multiple versions), Konqueror (3.1 and up) and Firefox with no problems. Can't speak for any other browsers.
[reply]
      Thats pretty cool now ALL textarea's have that effect though. I wonder if we could get a class name attatched to that. Althouh i'm not sure it bugs me it just makes the user settings screen a bit wonky. I love my new reply box, ++ !

      ___________
      Eric Hodges
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Re: Compose box too small
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 02, 2004 at 00:25 UTC
    try out a browser like lynx or w3m. with them, you can choose which editor is used for textareas.
    (this is one of the few things i miss with Opera.)
    still, i would find it nice if one could choose the textarea size in the user-settings.
    (posted with w3m)
[reply]
      MozEX lets you use an external editor for text areas in Mozilla and Firefox.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

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