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Browser Development • QoL features to be added to Scratchpad editor

Pale Moon forum - Forum index [Unofficial] April 30, 2026
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Ever since Pale Moon was forked from Firefox, Scratchpad editor has received little to no attention, making the editor lack in so many features. As a man who's developing an extension that is relying on Scratchpad editor by default, I can't confidently decide for the Scratchpad editor to be the default, if not atleast some of these features to be added into it:

  • Dark theme for the editor surface : This is the most important feature to be included into the editor, in my opinion. I would be having a theme to turn the browser dark, and it affects almost every window on Pale Moon, and then I open Scratchpad editor and BOOM! It hurts my eyes and I would not be able to look at the window for longer than 4 minutes. Genuinely, if you're not convinced with adding any of the features from this post, atleast consider this one to be added

  • The "help" button navigates to a page that doesn't exist : That could easily be fixed by making it point to a related webpage that exists on RealityRipple's archive website, or maybe create a website article, if you are planning to add more features on the editor and make it more appealing to the developers.

  • Inline find-and-replace bar : Today only Ctrl+F "find next" is wired (no replace, no case-sensitive toggle, no regex, no match counter). These features exist on every modern editors, I think Scratchpad could also utilize these features.

  • Linting via JSHint or ESLint : Surfaces parse errors and basic style issues with red-squiggle markers. The editor would be very useful if it would have the latest linting mechanism with it.

I would also ask for some convenient features, like "Keyboard shortcut customization" to utilize the autocomplete suggestions ("CTRL+Space" doesn't sound like the most convenient keyboard shortcut to use something that most editors enable it by default), but let's focus on adding the most important features that would make the editor much more convenient to use. The features that I asked to be added are not some advanced VS code-level of features, it's what already exist on most other editors.


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