Turning off the full height editor option in WordPress 4.0
Published on 10th September 2014 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutesThough I casually follow WordPress development, it's not nearly as rigorous as when I submitted a patch that earned me a mention on a main WordPress release's contributor list. This may explain why I barely noticed the full editor setting, which is turned on by default.
WordPress has become so mature now that I almost do not expect major revisions like the overhauls received by the administration back-end in 2008. The second interface was got so right that it still is with us, even if there were concerns in my mind at the time as to how usable it would be. Sometimes, those initial suspicions can come to nothing.
However, WordPress 4.0 introduced a major editor change that I'm not sure is successful. A full-height editor sounds good in principle, but its implementation has rough edges that make me wonder if any UX person reviewed it. Scrolling becomes strange, with the editor's toolbar fixing in place when you scroll down far enough. The sidebar then scrolls out of sync with the editor box, creating an odd sensation. Keyboard shortcuts like CTRL + HOME and CTRL + END don't work properly, which convinced me this new arrangement wasn't for me and I wanted to disable it.
A Google search found nothing useful, so I tried the WordPress.org forum. This revealed I should have looked in the screen options dropdown box for "Expand the editor to match the window height" to deselect it. Because of a Visual Editor control there, I'd checked the user profile screen but found nothing, showing the setup logic is poor. Perhaps the Visual Editor option should be a screen option too. Thankfully, the window height editor setting only needs changing once for both posts and pages, covering all situations.
With a distraction-free editing option available, I'm not sure why someone added the full height editor too. If WordPress keeps this feature, it needs refinement to behave more conventionally. I wouldn't build a website with such ill-synchronised scrolling. This needs work, as does the Visual Editor setting location. Perhaps both settings should be at the user level, rather than having one above that level. Before finding the solution, I considered using distraction-free mode permanently and installed the WP Editor plugin. I kept the plugin for its code highlighting, even though entering code view always creates a new revision. Despite this issue, things are now better.
Just wanted to say thank you. I was getting worried we'd be stuck with this awful "feature" and couldn't find a way to disable it! (Didn't think of looking in the screen options, ha!)
As it happened, I too was having the same thoughts until I found out what was what with this. Glad that I have helped.
If you want to disable this option completely for all users, then add this to your theme's functions.php:
[code]
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'turn_off_autoresize' );
function turn_off_autoresize(){
set_user_setting( 'editor_expand', 'off' );
}
add_action('admin_head', 'turn_off_autoresize_css');
function turn_off_autoresize_css(){
echo '
#adv-settings .editor-expand {display:none !important;}
';
}
[/code]
This sets the user's setting to expand = off, and hides the option in the 'screen options' to turn it on (the latter is perhaps redundant, however if the user sets it on then on the next page load the first function will turn it back off -- so it's best to hide this option altogether).
Thanks for this suggestion.