Fast Reply and RTE

[K. T. Walrus]

I'm sure this has probably been suggested a thousand times already, but just let me post the request again in hopes of seeing this implemented.

The Fast Reply "lite" editor now shows a row of buttons for the more useful operations like bold, italics, smilie insertion, etc.

It sure would be nice if there were a version of this "lite" editor where the buttons were RTE and these few buttons worked like the full RTE. It is confusing to many about the BBCode inserted by the buttons (I have set the default to be the RTE for all users).

Another related enhancement would to make the emoticons dropdown work (instead of a link to the popup). Maybe this dropdown could be generated even if the "lite" editor can't be made RTE.

I suppose the full RTE isn't loaded due to the massive amount of JS that probably executes and that the Fast Reply editor is loaded on every topic view. I'm not really familiar with how all this works, but if the initialization code is so slow, you could maybe design it so most of the initialization takes place only when some element in the Fast Reply editor is clicked (maybe this is a dumb idea - just brainstorming - there has to be ways to make this acceptable).

Regardless, it seems to me that you should be able to write a reasonably quick "lite" Fast Reply RTE editor where the only button actions that are implemented are the one's available for use and that the text is formatted on the fly.

Anyway, from an end user perspective who uses the RTE full editor, the current Fast Reply editor is lacking and I would like to see this improved.

[bfarber]

The idea of the fast reply was to just give a quick little editor area to type in a reply without dealing with the entire post screen, rte js, post options, and so on.

If you want the full editor, you should hit add reply. That's my opinion at least (and Matt's, at least when the fast reply was overhauled for 2.2).

This is certainly a debatable topic though, as you are right - it has come up before.