Tab key in text fields and indenting

These comments refer only to the plain text area fields in LP not the rich visual editors:

I find it really annoying in large text fields on web forms especially when I am trying to write a semi structured document that tabbing and indenting do not work.

First of all the tab key jump to the next form field which is counter intuitive when editing a document.

Second it is really hard to write an indented paragraph like

The quick
brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog.

I have to hit the space key four times on each line to do the above. I am sure that some fancy JavaScript could solve this problem.

(1) The tab key should work as in an editor, perhapps only after the user has entered at least one character of text so that by default it works as normal in a web page for jumping between elements

(2) If I hit return on an indented line then the next line should be indented as per the previous line.

This is pretty much how non rich text text areas on the web operate.

That being said, a few of us developers were talking, and there are two solutions that came to mind. We could adopt some focus tracking / key press counting tricks which would let someone tab through, or indent depending on what they have been doing.

Alternatively we might just enable a really stripped down version of the rich text editor we use for the other large text areas.

So, we have two possible solutions in mind. I’ll add a workitem with a link back to this thread so we can keep track of this.