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!