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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

The closer the average textfield's behavior could be to that of emacs, the happier I would be.

Mac OS X supports a decent batch of emacs-style keybindings -- C-a and C-e work, C-k and C-y work, the cursor-movement keys work. Give me C-s and C-r and I would be even happier, though. Or C-x C-w to write half-written drafts of news.yc posts to files for backup. Or C-x C-i to import text from files on disk. The list goes on and on.

I type an unfortunate amount of text into browser fields during the course of a day. It would be nice to be able to make these fields work more like a decent editor, and by that I don't mean TinyMCE.

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If you're a Firefox user, check out the "It's All Text!" extension. It lets you edit any text area in the external editor of your choice. For instance, I'm composing this comment in vim.

The download page at mozilla.com claims that it's hard to get working on Mac OS X, but that's actually not true. Skim through the comments... someone explains how do to it.

Thanks, this is just the kind of comment I was fishing for!

I was scared off by the claims that the OS X install was tricky. That and the fact that I don't use Firefox for anything but Firebug at the moment... I find Safari to be more stable and faster. This might tempt me to switch back to the Fox, though.

I can't think of a single time I've ever used C-x C-i. I have my C-w bound to backward-kill-word, which I definitely wish every editable text area would obey. I find it's damn near always faster to kill the whole word and retype it rather than C-h to the spot of the typo.

Well, that's emacs for you. Everyone gravitates to different bits.

Yes, backward-kill-word would be excellent. I have C-backspace bound to that in Emacs, but I also have a Kinesis keyboard, so C-backspace is just as easy to type as C-w.

9ne is an e-macs type textarea project.. but it was too buggy for me to consider

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