This isn’t what you think. Tabbing between form fields is a built in behavior in modern web browsers that admittedly saves a load of time and is extremely convenient. This article is not about tabbing between form fields. It’s about tabbing IN form fields.

As someone who spends a lot of time in a web browser, and a lot of time again coding in a web browser, this has been one of my biggest pet peeves. One of the principles of clear code is lots of whitespace. Tabs help set hierarchy and make code much more readable. In your web browser, if you press the “Tab” key in a form field, you just jump to the next input. This is inconvenient! I want to make my code readable! And I don’t want to press the spacebar a thousand times to make it so!

Fortunately, there’s a great Firefox extension that fixes this! It’s called “Tabinta”, which stands for Tab in Textarea. Simply install the extension and you’ll be able to make tabs in multi-line text inputs! It’s simple to turn off as well (just right click!) and offers a wealth of configuration options through Firefox’s about:config. I’m seriously so happy I found this.

Right-oh, nose back to the grindstone!