I was entering some HTML in a comments field on the web a few days ago and I finally cracked under the annoyance of having to use spaces to indent the markup. Textarea fields inherently don’t allow TAB characters, as the TAB character is reserved to allow keyboard movement through form fields.

I decided it was time to do something about it! I saw that someone created the Tabinta extension for Firefox, but there was no corresponding extension for Chrome that would allow me to drop TAB characters into any text field.

So, I put together a little extension. Before you say, “but, what if I want to TAB through my form fields?”, the extension takes that into account.

The TAB capability is only “activated” after you’ve already entered a character in the textarea field.

It also allows SHIFT+TAB.

I serves my needs, but if anyone finds a way to enhance it, please let me know!

Tab Grabber on the Chrome Web Store