http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=18652

A couple of people have pointed out that it's easy to make typos in the one-line chatterbox. Could we add a user option to display the box as a textarea rather than a textfield?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(jcwren) RE: Bigger Chatterboxes?
by jcwren (Prior) on Jun 22, 2000 at 23:30 UTC
    I have decided to disagree with this idea. Not in terms of voting it down, but simply disagreeing. Originally, I was a proponent of fixing /msh (myself being the master of mistyped /msg at... inopportune... times). It was briefly fixed. I came to the conclusion that it kind of detracts from the aura of the monastery.

    Along these lines, I feel the same is true of the chatterbox. Many MANY things are discussed in the chatterbox, from Perl code, to politics, to... other things. If we change how it works, the feel of the monastery changes. Oh sure, it could be a super-slick glitter site, with fancy graphics, input fields that don't let you make mistakes, all sorts of things.

    But is that what we want? Do we want our monastery, built of 200 year old brick and mortar, to be turned in a $5 million dollar big-city church? I don't. Maybe I thought I did, but even the brief exposure to realizing that /msh could be fun (not to mention the entertainment of some people who thought it *was* a real command), makes me like the monastery the way it is. We may put up a few new wall hangings, clean the windows, and sweep the SHIT errors under the carpet, but do we really want much more change? Think about it...

    --Chris
RE: Bigger Chatterboxes?
by crystalflame (Novice) on Jun 22, 2000 at 22:34 UTC
    A textarea with a height of 1 line, perhaps; that way the scroll bars would take effect. The only problem would be that now incoming chatterbox posts could be multi-line messages instead of one-line (albeit sometimes long) strings. Would there be any way to restrict the client to a single line of input with horizontal scrolling?