Fix the WordPress post editor with Greasemonkey

way too small

The WordPress post editor is way too small. Look:

That’s like, 10 lines of text. Anything but a very short post, and you have to scroll.

Scrolling won’t kill you of course, but unless you’re browsing on your phone, you probably have lots of vertical space to spare, so why not use it?

One way to increase it is the setting in your WordPress dashboard :

Settings > Writing > Size of the post box

You can also just drag the bottom right corner of the post editor!

So it turns out WordPress has this covered. (So if you came here looking for how to change that height, you’re done – if you want to learn how to make any change to a website, setting or none, read on!)

But what if there was no such setting? Is there a way to change things like this on websites you visit?

enter the monkey

Greasemonkey is made for stuff like this: customising web pages to suit your needs. It’s a firefox extension that allows you to store little snippets of javascript that run on certain pages (or whole sites).

You could change the fonts and backgrounds, or make your wordpress post editor bigger or pretty much any change you can imagine. Some people have even made scripts to play tedious facebook games for them (pro tip: if you’d rather have the computer play it for you, it’s not a “game”).

There’s a whole bunch of neat scripts other people have made on userscripts.org.

Go get it now and I’ll show you how I fixed the post editor.

fixing the post editor

After you’ve installed Greasemonkey and restarted Firefox, you should see a little monkey on the bottom right of the browser:

Right-click on it and choose New user script. Give it a meaningful name, and under includes, put

http://whateveryoublognameis.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php*

(the asterisk makes this script work with any URL starting with http://whateveryoublognameis.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php)

You’ll have to choose a text editor the first time you run it (I recommend notepad2, you’ll get nice syntax highlighting, but any plain text editor, like windows Notepad, will do)

Your text editor will appear with a nice header. Put the following line under it:

document.getElementById('content').rows = 30;

Like this:

Change the 30 if you want the post editor to be even larger (WordPress’s default is 20).

Hit save, and your done. Next time you edit a post in wordpress, it should look more like this:

Ahhhhhhhhh. Much more room.

Enjoy!