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Comment by olegp | Hacker News Reader

We are aware of this and are working on an on screen keyboard, kind of like this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual-k...

To answer the question below: we would need a custom layout to ensure all the curly brackets and other common JS chars are one tap away

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The Google docs team stopped to use contentEditable and developed instead a new "editing surface and layout engine" in Javascript. http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about...

I don't have an iPad(yet), but I tried a very basic page you can get at http://beebole.com/brol/contentEditable.html Tap the blue screen and start to type. On an android phone it works ok.

Why not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?

It looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to do so.

Alright, but shouldn't the solution be to allow the user to use either Google's keyboard or the built-in(by using textarea)?

The built-in one has a dictionary and some autocompletion, which could be good or annoying... :)

Most likely annoying if you're writing code.

Perhaps, maybe on par with seeing some home-made keyboard on screen. IMHO.

Yes, a custom keyboard for this kind of app should include the necessary buttons for JavaScript. Curly braces, etc.

I have played with making an absolutely positioned single-char text input box in my custom editor (https://github.com/dnewcome/richie). The idea is that it forces the built-in keyboard to show but the input is caught and inserted into the DOM. I don't use contenteditable since it doesn't work on most mobile devices. My hacks are really rough but I think the technique could be polished eventually.

Don't work on iOS. In my web app, I display a plain textarea for iPhone and iPad, but it's not an IDE.

Why doesn't @contenteditable work on the iPhone?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723592/why-doesnt-content...

Is contentEditable not supported by iPad?

http://www.quora.com/Is-contentEditable-not-supported-by-iPa...

AFAIK it supports contentEditable, but just doesn't show the keyboard for those elements. So theoretically formatting commands and such work.

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