Pony: Bigger text-entry boxes?

February 9, 2009 8:48 PM

Pony: Can we please get bigger text-entry boxes?

Well, the fires seem to be put out and even the twitter boxes on our profiles are updating again, so why not trot out a pony? It seemed like something that must have come up earlier, but either it's never been addressed in its own post, or I'm full of google-fail today.

Every time I write a comment or post, and it gets lengthy, I start wishing I had a bigger More Inside box to work with; as it is, I frequently compose posts in another app, just so I don't have to scroll so much to see what I've written. Can we please make the More Inside boxes bigger? Longer? Wider? Other properties that make me think of incredibly juvenile penis jokes?

posted by Tomorrowful to feature requests at 8:48 PM (34 comments total)

Or dual-size. The site uses enough ajaxy stuff at this point that a tiny marker in the top right or something to toggle a big/small textbox and write the pref to the cookie, say, wouldn't be too onerous to throw into the mix, hopefully.

Me, I don't mind too much either way.

Also, Tomorrowful, if you're using Firefox, there are extensions that make all textboxes size-adjustable, so if you don't get your pony, you could try that.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:02 PM on February 9

I BEG YOUR PARDON?

Oh I see what you mean.

This wouldn't be a bad pony at all, actually.
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:03 PM on February 9

Tomorrowful: Other properties that make me think of incredibly juvenile penis jokes?

We don't need bigger textboxes, that would only facilitate big, rambling comments. What we really need are circumscribed declawrations.
posted by Kattullus at 9:08 PM on February 9 [1 favorite]

FOR DEADLINE SEE OP USERNAME.
posted by heyho at 9:21 PM on February 9 [2 favorites]

This has come up many times. Or, at least once. All I can do is reiterate my assertion that the entry field should be 60-80% of window width.

For me, this is right up there with the image tag :)
posted by Chuckles at 9:28 PM on February 9

haven't the comment boxes already been resizeable for a long time? i'm typing this comment in a box that i've embiggened with the little draggable tab in the corner down there. no fancy extensions, just regular ol' safari. am i missing something here?
posted by sergeant sandwich at 9:35 PM on February 9 [2 favorites]

incredibly juvenile penis jokes
It's something that's come up before; indeed comes up often. Many have felt this pressing need and longed fervently for enhanced ease of entry. At MetaFilter we're making a big tent and what you're pitching might well be something that could be pulled off but the outcome may be messy or worse, absent sensible precautions, engender a whole new bundle of problems a few months down the line.
posted by Abiezer at 9:38 PM on February 9 [4 favorites]

I think that's a safari function. No such tab appears in IE or Firefox.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:39 PM on February 9

oh, my bad. i was thinking it got rolled out here, but i must've missed the part where matt backed out. been using it since then without realizing it was a safari-only thing.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 9:42 PM on February 9

Other properties that make me think of incredibly juvenile penis jokes?

from what i hear interest rates are really stiff and the resale values of homes has become flaccid
posted by pyramid termite at 9:58 PM on February 9

oh, no, i put it in the wrong place
posted by pyramid termite at 9:58 PM on February 9

In Chrome all text areas are re-sizable, and it is good.
posted by dirtdirt at 10:12 PM on February 9

In Chrome all text areas are re-sizable, and it is good.
Oh that's bad-ass right there and here I've been using Chrome for months and didn't know...
posted by dawson at 10:22 PM on February 9

We actually tried rolling out a javascript-driven resizable comment box a while back but it was causing bad problems of some sort and so got turned off. If we can find a way to make it happen, I think it'd be neat, but I don't think it's exactly a high priority at the moment.

Also, I believe the default box is now significantly larger than it was for much of mefi's history.

Safari/Chrome aside, I feel like someone had shopped around a client-side Greasemonkey script that made this doable in Firefox (and Opera?) for any website you like; that might be worth hunting down if anybody remembers such a thing.
posted by cortex at 10:23 PM on February 9

from what i hear interest rates are really stiff and the resale values of homes has become flaccid

Most analysts agree rising inflation may cause our economy to come into to a deep depression.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:43 PM on February 9

We actually tried rolling out a javascript-driven resizable comment box a while back but it was causing bad problems of some sort and so got turned off. If we can find a way to make it happen, I think it'd be neat, but I don't think it's exactly a high priority at the moment.

But it doesn't have to be resizable.. Just make it proportional.
posted by Chuckles at 10:47 PM on February 9 [1 favorite]

as it is, I frequently compose posts in another app

ur doin it rite.
posted by fleacircus at 10:53 PM on February 9

Safari/Chrome aside, I feel like someone had shopped around a client-side Greasemonkey script that made this doable in Firefox (and Opera?) for any website you like; that might be worth hunting down if anybody remembers such a thing.

I mentioned it in the very first comment in this thread. OH NOES CORTEX IS KILLFILING ME! Here's a link to the extension for Firefox.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:59 PM on February 9 [3 favorites]

It's already resizeable in Chrome. :P
posted by aubilenon at 12:59 AM on February 10

Couldn't you just write less?
posted by dg at 1:04 AM on February 10 [2 favorites]

It's not the size of your box, it's what you do with it. I keep telling myself that.
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:13 AM on February 10

I use the Firefox extension to which stavros links and it's awesome. Thank you, metafilter, for leading me thither thence.

Also, I have a second plugin that makes a little "edit" button in the lower-right of every text box; when I click it, a text editor (of my choice: I use VIM; you can set it up to use whatever you want) opens up with the contents of the box in it. When I save the contents of the editor, the text box in the browser is updated. Very handy; I should use it more...

Here you go.
posted by amtho at 2:09 AM on February 10 [3 favorites]

also, we need our own individual colors. I deserve pink. focus groups have shown it tests well with my key target demographic.
posted by krautland at 5:26 AM on February 10

Dude, I never knew about that It's All Text extension, which is all kinds of pure awesomeness. Thanks for that, amtho!
posted by delfuego at 6:02 AM on February 10

OH NOES CORTEX IS KILLFILING ME!

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL STAVROS THAT I AM NOT TALKING TO HIM

My bad. It was late. There were kittens. Etc.
posted by cortex at 7:39 AM on February 10

I think the key word is "expandable" and not "bigger." Make it much bigger than it already is and you'll get people MeTa-ing about why the text entry box is so damned big. I'm comfortable with the size of the text box as it is right now, but I don't usually make terribly long posts. YMMV.
posted by sjuhawk31 at 9:36 AM on February 10

haven't the comment boxes already been resizeable for a long time? i'm typing this comment in a box that i've embiggened with the little draggable tab in the corner down there. no fancy extensions, just regular ol' safari. am i missing something here?

Stupid MACS get a real computr lol, amirite?
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:42 AM on February 10

The dimensions of the text in a literal cartesian space should not be conflated with the image cast on the text as a surface crossing narrative and polemic spaces. That is: it is possible as a thought experiment to imagine an infinite sized "field" for "editing" - accessed and navigated with teh scrollbars and mousewheels of our subjective notions of discourse, sliced vertically along "history" and horizontally along "topic"; yet such an incalculably large text field would still not lift its edges from where they remain glued to the narrative they embed within - nor to achieve an intersection with polemic space forming a manifold of dimension greater than one: that is, a curved line at best. So if we agree, as I think we must, that the best can hope for with a larger "field" is to cram more into the same (locally) linear space, we see the futility of trying to "expand" along existing axes, and that in fact we need to fly free of the bonds imposed by the strictures of existing design:

We need three dimensional text fields. Anything less is rhetorical appeasement.
posted by freebird at 10:50 AM on February 10 [3 favorites]

Damned thing should be made 25% smaller: this place is verbose enough as it is...
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:50 PM on February 10

tl;dr

dear wonder chicken, thanks for the extension thingy, it's fantastic!
posted by filthy light thief at 2:27 PM on February 10

when I click it, a text editor (of my choice: I use VIM; you can set it up to use whatever you want) opens up with the contents of the box in it.

Yikes.
posted by smackfu at 5:26 PM on February 10

Write less. Most of us don't have time to read long posts.
posted by Zambrano at 10:04 AM on February 11

That is demonstrably false.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:21 PM on February 11

Speak for yourself. I propose a twitter-style limit on comment length so I can read everything.
posted by dg at 1:49 AM on February 14