Making ZMI scripting less irritating with Tabinta

I often find myself habitually hitting the <tab> key while writing scripts in the ZMI, only to find that I've gone and moved the focus away from the textarea and onto another form element instead of indenting like I'd intended. I recently came across the Firefox extension Tabinta. "Tabinta" is short for "Tab in textarea" and does exactly that and nothing more.

The plugin's preferences interface is somewhat lacking, only allowing you to assign the keystroke to use to insert tabs (I chose the obvious <tab>...). There are a few extra settings that hide under the hood though. Type "about:config" into your location bar, and then filter by "tabinta". I changed "tabinta.hard" to "false" and "tabinta.tab_width" to "4" to force it to insert 4 spaces instead of a tab character.

Unfortunately, Tabinta doesn't work with Kupu's normal interface, although it will insert tabs when you're in Kupu's HTML view, as well as any other plain textarea within Plone.