spun off from bug 161431 the phpbb forum code and other things have buttons which insert text into textareas. these page use proprietary script in IE, and there apparently isn't an equivalent method in mozilla yet. there should be one. ccing people that were just discussing this on IRC... (apologies for the poor quality of this RFE - I don't know enough DOM/script stuff to give more detail)

Um.. this is a dup, no? I swear I've seen this filed before...

can't find a dupe and neither could bz, so ignoring bz because he said to... :) might be worth mentioning the similar, but different, bug 163898 here though in case it's relevant to an implementation of this...

Note that the fix for bug 163898 will be checked in soon. The current implementation puts the new "cmd_insertText" on the new PlaintextEditorController and thus would not be available to textareas. If the command was put on the BaseController, it would be available to text widgets. But I think Kin had some security concerns about doing this?

I think this bug has been fixed. For Mozilla there is selectionStart, selectionEnd and setSelectionRange(). I think it was a dupe for bug 88049: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88049

Bug 88049 seems to have provided what is needed here. See the testcase for bug 190382 for example. -> WORKSFORME