#7954 new markdown editor fails to trigger browser spell checkers
From https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/10975/ (that posting apparently failed to get anyone's attention there in the past week, so I'm cross-posting it here):
With yesterday's [2015-07-30] change to the message input form (i.e. the box I'm typing this into now), I find that my browser (Firefox 39) no longer invokes its spell-checker while I'm typing. If I right-click the text area, I still get "Check Spelling" as an option, but clicking that does nothing. The problem is apparently specific to this new form, because other input boxes (such as the one at https://sourceforge.net/support) still flag misspelled words.
Also, it's not specific to Firefox, or to newer browsers. I tested with Chrome, and with old installations of Opera 12 and Safari for PC, and found the same behavior in all of them.
There is an option to enable spell checking in the SimpleMDE editor, but it is not currently enabled due to slow performance. Using the browser's native built-in spell checker doesn't look possible according to this bug report: https://github.com/codemirror/CodeMirror/issues/1017
Is there any way to turn off this "SimpleMDE editor", and go back to a regular text box? For me (and I suspect for others as well), the loss of the spell checker far outweighs the other improvements. Now I have to compose messages in a separate program and paste the text in, which means I don't ever get to use these improvements.
BTW: Any clue why my gravatar isn't showing up here? I'm using the same eMail I use on SourceForge.
Last edit: T. Bug Reporter 2015-08-10
Issue preventing us from turning spell checking on https://github.com/NextStepWebs/simplemde-markdown-editor/issues/56
That issue has been fixed in latest versions, but I think the spell checker is still pretty limited. There's no way to see correction suggestions and no way to add words to a local dictionary.
Also when we do it, I'd tweak the CSS a bit to use a border instead of background:
This ticket is still open and unassigned, but this SimpleMDE is a problem for lots of users (still looks different than the resulting post if markup is used, leading to multiple edits (preview option was disabled); no (browser built-in) spell-checker [I don't want an additional javascript one], no option to resize and other stuff possible with textareas]).
Why do I have to inspect the textarea with the browser developer tools and remove everything from the Editor component by hand just to get a textarea back? What about a simple button to turn the Editor component on/off (if possible providing the preview option again)?
I'll give this another try:
Can we please have a user setting (Account->Preferences) to deactivate the SimpleMDE?
Fixed with https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allura/git/merge-requests/349/