How to easily Italicize and "Bold" your comments on blogs

I hate the complicated way of “Italicizing” and “Bolding” my comments on blogs. I have to manually surround the text with “<em></em>” and “<strong></strong>” tags. It breaks my flow of thought and wastes my time.

Being a very lazy person, I decided to find an easier way. My final solution works on Firefox and Google Chrome (sorry IE – you suck). This is how I implemented it – and it just takes a few clicks!

This is my URL that’s referred to in the video: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/81551.

Watch this in full screen and in HD if you can – it’s much clearer.

Update: Steps are different for Firefox and Google chrome. In the video, Google chrome is shown first, and then starting at 1:15, the steps are shown for Firefox.

After this, here are the shortcuts which will work in any textarea in Firefox and Google chrome.

Ctrl+B surrounds selected text with <strong></strong>
Ctrl+I surrounds selected text with <em></em>
Ctrl+Shift+M surrounds selected text with <a href=””></a> (cursor will be placed within the quotation marks)
Ctrl+U surrounds selected text with <u></u>
Ctrl+S surrounds selected text with <s></s>
Ctrl+P surrounds selected text with <p></p>
Alt+C counts the words and characters in selection. If nothing selected, it counts all the words in the box
Ctrl+2 surrounds selected text with <h2></h2>
Hope you found this as useful as I do. No more manual typing!

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60 thoughts on “How to easily Italicize and "Bold" your comments on blogs”

    • In reply to Indian Homemaker

      Steps are different for Firefox. See the video starting at 1:15 for Firefox specific instructions. Let me know if it works…

      You don’t have any add ons that block javascript such as “noscript” do you?

      Reply

    • In reply to Indian Homemaker

      Some adblockers etc do that – but if you don’t know of any, it means that’s not the problem.

      After installing greasemonkey, restarting Firefox, and installing the script, can you right click on the monkey face at the bottom of the window and see if “New HTML Insert” has a check mark next to it?

      Reply

    • In reply to Indian Homemaker

      Super! Now reload this page and try it out…select some text, press Ctrl+I and see if it works…

      Just to check that the script is installed, right click on the monkey face at the bottom of the window and see if “New HTML Insert” has a check mark next to it.

      If it still doesn’t work, then we’ll just have to let it go and uninstall the greasemonkey add on :(

      Reply

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