I’m a Vim bigot, but I reluctantly leave my comfortable off-white-on-black terminal windows for a web browser once in a while. Sometimes I even have to type more than a word or two in a textarea.

I used to grumble every time a site provided a tiny little text box for entry, or when I wanted to make an edit and left a row of j and k characters splattered through my text.

Now I use the It’s All Text Firefox extension and, before I let annoyance creep up on me, flick my mouse to a little blue box at the bottom right corner of the text area. With one click, up pops Gvim.

Suddenly, it’s worth typing more than a sentence into a web form again.

Thank you to all contributors to It’s All Text for making textareas usable.