Some difficulty writing posts in Discourse

(These troubles might be unique to me but I wanted to see if there were any solutions.)

I am having trouble writing more detailed posts in Discourse due to the smaller text area. I know that I can enlarge the text area by dragging the entire create a new topic dialog/modal upward. But is there a way to set this to the default?

Also, the tab button doesn’t let you insert a tab in the text area - it tabs to a new part of the page. This can complicate code entry for us tab users.

Any workarounds for this or do I just have to manage? (It might help if a user could remove the tags section of the new topic/reply dialog so that the post text area could expand to that space.)

Thanks for the great forum regardless.

Hey @ShinVe,

For now, unfortunately, you have to enlarge the composer area. We are working on “refining” the tag area to make it smaller (us staff has brought that up with the designers and it is on their backlog to re-invent).

As for tabbing, that you will be stuck with. Welcome to the web. vBulletin didn’t permit it, GMail doesn’t permit it, nothing web related lets you easily insert tabs, from what I can tell – so if you find one, point it out, but that issue was raised on Discourse, and it seems the Discourse Team is uninterested in trying to permit it.

You can also widen the text area by closing the right-side “live preview” pane.

for tabs, same as always, you need to write the tabs in your favorite text editor then copy/paste into the text area.

NOTE
If you want the post to preserve the tabs you need to wrap it inside code backticks or a pre.

Here is a post about including code blocks

@Mittineague. That’s a good tip, thanks.

@cpradio. Too bad about tabs, but I see the issue. Hopefully a user option will be available some day, or maybe a greasemonkey plugin or a similar offering.

Greasemonkey shouldn’t be too difficult… You’ll simply need to capture the keydown event while the composer has focus and capture tab to write out \t