At the moment the text area in the edit form has a fixed size of 20 rows.

On longer pages its not very comfortable to edit pages with such a small box. The whole screen size should be used instead(example).

The whole screen width is used, via the following from style.css:

{ width: 100%; }

Perhaps you have replaced it with a modified style sheet that does not include that? --Joey

The screen shot was made with http://ikiwiki.info/ where i didn't change anything. The width is optimally used. The problem is the height.

You confused me by talking about rows...
I don't know how to allow CSS to resize a textarea to the full browser height. The obvious height: 75%; does not work, at least in firefox and epiphany.

Ah, of course, if it did work, it'd make it be 75% of the full page height, and not the browser window height.

According to this page:

50% of what? Parent says ‘auto’, which means base it on the height of the child content. Which depends on the height on the parent. Argh! etc.

So you have to give its parent a percentage height. And the parent's parent, all the way up to the root. So, other than a javascript-based resizer, some very tricky and invasive CSS seems to be needed. Please someone let me know if you succeed in doing that. --Joey

the javascript approach would need to work something like this: you need to know about the "bottom-most" item on the edit page, and get a handle for that object in the DOM. You can then obtain the absolute position height-wise of this element and the absolute position of the bottom of the window to determine the pixel-difference. Then, you set the height of the textarea to (current height in px) + determined-value. This needs to be re-triggered on various resize events, at least for the window and probably for other elements too. I may have a stab at this at some point. -- Jon

Google chrome has a completly elegant fix for this problem: All textareas have a small resize handle in a corner, that can be dragged around. No nasty javascript needed. IMHO, this is the right solution, and I hope other browsers emulate it. done --Joey

Wouldn't it be possible to just implement an integer-valued setting for this, accessible via the "Setup" wiki page? This would require a wiki regen, but such a setting would not be changed frequently I suppose. Also, Mediawiki has this implemented as a per-user setting (two settings, actually, -- number of rows and columns of the edit area); such a per-user setting would be the best possible implementation, but I'm not sure if ikiwiki already supports per-user settings. Please consider implementing this as the current 20 rows is a great PITA for any non-trivial page.

I don't think it would need a wiki rebuild, as the textarea is generated dynamically by the CGI when you perform a CGI action, and (as far as I know) is not cooked into any static content. -- Jon

There is no need for a configuration setting for this -- to change the default height from 20 rows to something else, you can just put something like this in your local.css: --Joey

#editcontent {
    height: 50em;
}