Ask HN: how would you supercharge the humble browser textarea?

[bowerbird]

the simple humble web-browser textarea...

i'm typing in one, right now...

we seem to be "stuck" with it. for now. and maybe for a long time into the future.

so let's think how to make the best of it.

what if we supercharge it, and pair it with a nice div that displays formatted output, treating the textarea text as light-markup?

the paired-div display part is really simple -- almost every markdown editor does that -- but how would _you_ "supercharge" the textarea?

first, you have to accept what it can't do, which is to display text of different sizes, different colors, or with different styling.

anything else -- everything else! -- is open.

oh, and we're not even trying to do wysiwyg. your focus must be the "semantic" structure.

a look at medium's editor shows buttons for: bold, italics, headers, lists, blockquotes, rules, and links. it also supports embeds, in addition to the standard .html image-tag. and it has a word-counter. because #whynot.

not included are what could be valuable things like find-and-replace, to mention the obvious.

plus -- as we go to the 2-pane interface -- (a) auto table-of-contents with active links, and (b) sync of the text and display fields _when_ a user wants but free-float when not, and (c) and (d) and (e) and (f) and...

i could go on. but i'm asking _you_ instead.

if you wanna post a comment in response, great; i can appreciate a good think-piece just fine.

but if you really want to get a lot of respect, code the javascript to make your thoughts real.

could be an fun weekend project, yes? :+)

if this draws any interest, i will upload my work thus far. so if you'd like a head-start with some actual code, you can wait for that.

otherwise, jump in without my preconceptions.

because, as we're stuck with this textarea shit, we might as well turn it into a shit sandwich.

-bowerbird

[hardwaresofton]

Not to be a downer but:

http://epiceditor.com/

http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/

[bowerbird → hardwaresofton]

good answer...

but i'm looking for something an average person could understand and add to an average webpage, with an investment running 3 minutes or less...

-bowerbird

[TophWells → bowerbird]

I just tried both of those. 3 minutes sounds about right to me, if you don't bother with any of the customisations.

[bowerbird → TophWells]

are you saying an average person can _understand_ those setups well enough to _install_ them in an _average_ web-page, with an investment of 3 minutes?

i mean... seriously. are you actually saying that?

-bowerbird

[TophWells → bowerbird]

An average person can't write "hello world" in an average web page, because to an average person that sort of technical ability is the province of mysterious web nerds. I'm assuming you mean "an average web designer" or some such.

Could you understand those setups in 3 minutes? No. But installing them is just a matter of copy-pasting a few lines of code from the creator's website. You can do that easily enough.

[bowerbird → TophWells]

ok, now i have a much better understanding what you meant.

as i said above, in another reply just now, i'm aiming at a "sweet-spot" that _might_ be as nonexistent as you say, i.e., an "average" user who'll edit a few lines of .html.

ideally, s/he should have a good understanding of all the implications and ramifications of those edited lines, too.

all of which should take no more than 3 minutes, total, because that's all the average person will devote to it.

meaning it will boil down to calling a javascript file, plus jquery (or some other package), and _nothing_more._

if it's that simple, this kind of "supercharging" will be used by enough people that it could attain critical mass.

otherwise, not.

and i'm quite sure that, if you actually do the exercise, you'll find that none of the solutions mentioned can be installed in such a straightforward and trouble-free way.

surely not in 3 minutes.

nor with any comprehension of all possible ramifications.

it might be that they haven't been packaged up that way; or it might be that they are complex enough that it won't be _possible_ to "package them up" to be that simple; but -- either way -- they are not now the answer i'm seeking.

i hope this clears up my position. thanks for the dialog.

-bowerbird

[TophWells → bowerbird]

Ah, I see. The solutions linked above certainly claim to be easy to install, but I got lazy and didn't finish the job when I tried them out. It certainly ought to be possible to set them up with a single line of JavaScript - I can't understand why the sample code doesn't work for me. But fair enough, you were right and I was wrong.

And there's an opening in the market for an easy-to-use easy-to-install JavaScript text editor. Perhaps we should make one.

[herokusaki → bowerbird]

Try Stack Overflow's editor.

[bowerbird → herokusaki]

try putting it in a web-page in 3 minutes. or 30 minutes. or 3 hours. or however long it takes. it's easy, right?

then post the u.r.l., so i can copy your web-page and have the editor work in a web-page i make in 3 minutes.

then, if you want, we can start up a discussion about why it doesn't have some of the handy features i have come to expect from using _other_ flavors of markdown.

a client-side javascript solution is the correct one, but showdown/pagedown/whatever is not the right choice; instead use chjj's nice script, perhaps in strapdownjs.

but basically, you've missed the important issue here: it's not how to convert text coming out of the textarea; it's how to supercharge the textarea to make it more useful and powerful during the process of composing text within it.

-bowerbird

[herokusaki → bowerbird]

Sorry for being unclear: my response was wholly about the 'understand' part. You can't integrate Stack Overflow's editor into your yen web page. I do think that a user can figure it out really quickly (the little formatting buttons above the text area and the simple markup help a lot).

[bowerbird → herokusaki]

um, well... perhaps i was the one who was being unclear, since tophwells seemed to have made the same assumption.

so, just to be more specific, even though we are well past the unofficial expiration-date for interest on this thread, yes, i absolutely want something that the end-user can grok _immediately_, because that should really go without saying.

but just as much, i'm thinking of something that a person -- even an average person, with no special "tech" skills, but merely a willingness to actually edit .html source -- could quickly understand and adapt for their own purposes.

see more in the response i will write next for tophwells.

-bowerbird

[mcintyre1994]

I like the idea of it autogrowing, although since that's something that should be enabled/disabled per textarea it's probably best left as it is for Javascript.