Style Textarea Resizers

By  on  

Modern browsers are nice in that they allow you to style some odd properties.  Heck, one of the most popular posts on this blog is HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS, a tiny but useful task.  Did you know you can also restyle the textarea resizer in WebKit browsers?  Let me show you how!

The CSS

One of WebKit's lessor known CSS artifacts is the ::-webkit-resizer pseudo:

/* transparent resizer */
::-webkit-resizer{ background-color:transparent; }

/* colorful resizer */
#colorful::-webkit-resizer{ background-color: pink; }

/* background resizer */
#bgresizer::-webkit-resizer{ background-image: url(resizer-background.png); }

::-webkit-resizer can be used by itself, changing all resizer displays, or on individual elements.

::-webkit-resizer certainly isn't a game-changer but it is another level of control most developers don't know is possible.  I do find the default resizer ugly so I may experiment with something nicer in the future.

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass

    I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    RealTime Stock Quotes with MooTools Request.Stocks and YQL

    It goes without saying but MooTools' inheritance pattern allows for creation of small, simple classes that possess immense power.  One example of that power is a class that inherits from Request, Request.JSON, and Request.JSONP:  Request.Stocks.  Created by Enrique Erne, this great MooTools class acts as...

  • By
    MooTools ASCII Art

    I didn't realize that I truly was a nerd until I could admit to myself that ASCII art was better than the pieces Picasso, Monet, or Van Gogh could create.  ASCII art is unmatched in its beauty, simplicity, and ... OK, well, I'm being ridiculous;  ASCII...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    Whoa, I knew about scrollbars, but not about the resizer.
    Thanks for the info!

  2. so awesome. =)

  3. Stophe

    Cool. Thanks. The options to style the resizer with css only seem to be fairly limited though ;)
    http://jsfiddle.net/CkLQD/1/

  4. Wow. I had no idea. Thanks for sharing!

  5. Too bad you cannot style the over, neither with an animation : http://cdpn.io/aoeJA

  6. Is it possible to use this in IE ?

    • That page doesn’t say anything about styling the resizer.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!