Keystrokes for formatting goodness

November 23, 2000 11:50 PM

I just added helpful keystrokes, ala Blogger, to the text areas in MetaFilter proper (coming soon here). You can now bold, italicize, and build links (my favorite) with a simple keystroke.

Unfortunately, it's IE 4+\Windows only, but if any enterprising javascripters can figure out a way to add html tags to textareas in Netscape, I'll be happy to implement it too.
posted by mathowie to feature requests at 11:50 PM (22 comments total)

these are nifty! You do good things Matt.

One minor nit (because I have to :-) : isn't the normal shortform of "control" "ctrl"? It honestly took me a second (hey, it's early :-) to figure out what "cntrl" meant. :-)
posted by cCranium at 4:51 AM on November 24, 2000

Matt, I love you. Forget that woman and marry me. In Vermont.
posted by dhartung at 7:14 AM on November 24, 2000

I didn't look down to write the Control Key abbreviation, so I was off. I just changed it.
posted by mathowie at 10:45 AM on November 24, 2000

:-) It definetely rocks. I've put more links in posts than ever. Very cool.
posted by cCranium at 12:18 PM on November 24, 2000

Yeah, these rock Matt. :) The only problem I'm having is that ICQ has Ctrl+Shift+A trapped to itself. But I and B are cool. :)
posted by pnevares at 1:39 PM on November 24, 2000

I just noticed one thing: they don't work in MetaTalk.
posted by pnevares at 1:43 PM on November 24, 2000

Oh, you can kill all keystrokes going to ICQ by tweaking your preferences. I couldn't use Photoshop with ICQ open until I found a way to shut off ICQ's keystrokes (PS has about a million shortcut keystrokes).

The link builder is the reason I added the code.
posted by mathowie at 1:43 PM on November 24, 2000

^ when I saw preferences, I mean your ICQ preferences/settings.
posted by mathowie at 1:43 PM on November 24, 2000

They don't? They seem to for me. Yep, they do.
posted by mathowie at 1:45 PM on November 24, 2000

i get an error on line 12 char 26, "document.mefi.comment is null or not an object"
i'm using IE 5.5 on win98, if that helps
posted by pnevares at 1:51 PM on November 24, 2000

IE5.5 on 2k throws the same error. But not in MF proper.
posted by cCranium at 2:03 PM on November 24, 2000

What pages do you get the errors on? I'm on win2k pro, running IE 5.5 SP1 and can't get any js errors in metatalk.
posted by mathowie at 2:26 PM on November 24, 2000

wait, I think I just fixed it. I forgot to name the form tags in metatalk.
posted by mathowie at 2:28 PM on November 24, 2000

works now, thanks matt :):)
posted by pnevares at 2:36 PM on November 24, 2000

[whispered out of corner of mouth] <quote>Unfortunately, it's IE 4+\Windows only...</quote>
posted by pnevares at 9:48 AM on November 27, 2000

Also, since I think it was part of the same change (I never noticed until this morning at least) the active textbox/area being lighter is a very cool interface tweak. It's just slick.
posted by cCranium at 2:07 PM on November 27, 2000

Yeah, cC, I wanted to test it out here first, and I'll add it to the full site later on.

It works in Netscape 6, IE 5+ and (I think) IE 5.0 for the Mac.
posted by mathowie at 7:18 PM on November 27, 2000

Looks like the buttons have changed too?
posted by pnevares at 7:25 PM on November 27, 2000

Whoops, apparently it was showing up on the Mac, I never intended that to happen. It should be gone now.
posted by mathowie at 7:34 PM on November 27, 2000

Yeah, pnevares, I'm going to play with the CSS to make the buttons look normal instead.
posted by mathowie at 7:34 PM on November 27, 2000

Matt, you are a g0d. :)
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 9:08 AM on November 28, 2000