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Comment by ajhurliman | Hacker News Reader

The stepper buttons on the number input are infuriating. They're far too small for anyone to click on, nobody uses them, and they look bad.

Invariably, a designer/PM/someone will come back and say "Is there any way we can get rid of those stepper buttons on the right?" and then it gets changed to a text input with JS validation.

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Yes.. but it is connected to Up and Down arrow. When you're trying to build a fast keyboardable UI, I've found it a convenient enough mechanism.

Also.. to this authors point, wouldn't you just use the 'validationMessage' if you're trying to extract the cause of the error from the field. I have yet to find myself in a position where I need the invalid value anyways.

They probably have an entirely different UX on mobile too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the arrow key functionality and I want to make it accessible, but the lack of ability to suppress the stepper buttons kills it for me

As are the associated change on scrolling behaviour. I keep finding myself adjusting number inputs when trying to scroll the page they're on.

This has got to be some kind of vestige from Windows 3.11, when the spinner control was about 3x larger - relative to the common screen sizes of the time, that is.

I'm baffled as to why in all these years no one just changed them into a pair of diagonally-separated buttons, and increased the width a bit. This would look a little awkward in the world of rectangular everything, but eh. The whole shtick with their size is that they're made to equal the input's height.

Alternatively, of course, custom forms just make the buttons full-size, and I'm pretty sure they could be positioned next to each other: https://i.stack.imgur.com/IHqmt.png

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