Can we improve the editor?

Currently, the textarea is, IMO, too small (even a short post like this one requires some scrolling when editing).

For larger posts (like this one) it's even worse. When writing/editing, I tend to go up and down the text, read and re-read a couple of times to make sure everything is ok, and a small textarea makes this process harder.

If we had a bigger textarea, I believe that would be a nice improvement in UX. Less scrolling, more text visible at once (I personally like to have a "wider vision" of the text, specially - but not limited to - when there's code), all of this really speeds up my process of writing a post.

What if we add an option to make the editor full-screen (or at least bigger)? That could be configurable in the editor itself (some button to toggle it), or in user preferences (not sure if this could be the only option though).

I also check the preview before posting, to make sure I didn't make any Markdown mistakes. Hence, a side-by-side preview - preferably with synched scrolling - would be welcome as well (instead of putting the preview below the textarea, which requires even more scrolling when I realize that I need to change something in the text) - something like this.

Just to provide some more context, either here or in SE (whose editor has the same issues), my workflow is basically: for new posts, I don't use the site's editor, because of the reasons stated above. I prefer to use a desktop text editor (with Markdown support) and copy/paste to the site - but I check the preview anyway, to make sure everything is ok (and because I don't use previews in my text editor, as this would not render the same way in the site, so it's not that useful for this case).

But when editing a post, I don't want to copy the whole content, paste in my editor, and copy/paste again to the site - that's too much work for an action that was supposed to be simple (editing directly on the post's page). But I do it anyway, the only exception being when the changes are too trivial (just a few spelling fixes). But even in those cases, a bigger textarea would make things a little bit easier (less scrolling).

All of that would be improved if we had a better editor: a bigger area to type the text - which requires less scrolling and gives me a wider view of the overall text - and a side-by-side preview, that would make my experience using the site much better.

If that's not possible, can we at least make the textarea resizable?

posted about 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

hkotsubo‭

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