In this episode, we walk through how to create a textarea in your app that automatically resizes its height as you type, using Alpine.js for simplicity. If you've ever seen those textareas that grow and shrink as you add or remove lines, that's exactly what we're building here!
We start with a basic HTML page, pull in Alpine, and set up a standalone textarea. Using Alpine's event handling, we connect an input event to a small resize
function. This function checks the scroll height of the textarea and adjusts the CSS height property to match, ensuring the textarea grows (and shrinks) to fit your content.
Along the way, you'll see why it's important to reset the height before recalculating it and how you can tweak it (like adding extra padding at the bottom if you want). We also refactor the code into a super concise, one-liner Alpine expression that you can easily reuse on any of your own textareas.
By the end, you'll have a neat Alpine snippet that delivers that smooth auto-expanding textarea experience with almost no code!