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Firefox puts cursor at the end of a textarea, not at the beginning, how can I change this (serious usability nightmare when working with a wiki)?

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When I edit my DokuWiki a lot of text is displayed in the textarea. Until Firefox 4 the cursor was always at the beginning of the textarea, which made it easy to scroll down to the part I needed to edit. Now the cursor is always at the end. This is a serious usability nightmare for me. How can I change it that the cursor is at the beginning of the textarea text?

When I edit my DokuWiki a lot of text is displayed in the textarea. Until Firefox 4 the cursor was always at the beginning of the textarea, which made it easy to scroll down to the part I needed to edit. Now the cursor is always at the end. This is a serious usability nightmare for me. How can I change it that the cursor is at the beginning of the textarea text?

All Replies (5)

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You may have switched the bidi text direction. On Windows and Linux you can toggle that via Shift+Ctrl+X. I do not know which sequence to use of Mac. You can try Shift+Cmd+X if Shift+Ctrl+X doesn't work.

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Hello cor-el,

thanks for your answer but unfortunately, this isn't it. I can toggle bidirectional text and the whole text is changed so that it aligns on the right side. But the problem I have is that the text is still aligns on the left side, editing is left-to-right, it's just the cursor that's at the end of the text.

Best regards & thank you

Daniel

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The site may be using JavaScript to place the cursor at that position.

Does that also happen on this forum if you try to edit one of your posts?

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It's difficult to test here as the box is not automatically selected when I click to edit it. I've tried Wikipedia, where the text box isn't selected either. But it happens in my DokuWiki (with monobook template) whenever I click to edit a page. I've asked the forum there and they thought it was a Firefox 4 issue (as it hasn't happened with the prior version).

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Okay, the problem seems to be the JavaScript focus() command which apparently forces the cursor to the end of the text area in Firefox 4 (apparently the only browser to do so). (Apparently as I am not familiar with JavaScript -- so this should happen on each website that has an edit button and uses focus to activate editing in a textarea.