The default behavior for Tab in rich text editors has been to insert a tabstop for quite some time. I think this is just a casualty of goog.editor.Editor's unconventional default behavior, which is to tab out of the field. If that is truly an oversight (not overriding this behavior), it says a lot about how the Gmail project is being run these days, because previously they did override this.

Just wanted to add it is goog.editor.Field, not goog.editor.Editor. When I wrote that, I told myself "don't call it goog.editor.Editor," a typo I often make in my code. I guess it's like when people look at something and then crash their car into it. Sorry about that.

This is not default behavior for TinyMCE (http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/full.php) or cKEditor (http://ckeditor.com/demo)

But old Gmail did override this.

Is it really unconventional though? Tab for navigation is the default behavior for HTML form inputs and contenteditable. I can't think of a website that I use that has input boxes that have tab do indent actually.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a widely used rich text editor, be it TinyMCE, CKEditor, YUI Editor or ExtJS' HtmlEditor that doesn't map the Tab key to insert a tabstop or a number of non-breaking spaces. goog.editor.Field is absolutely in the minority in that regard.

There are good design reasons for this. The goog.editor package is designed to be modular. This tab-to-indent behavior is instead provided by the goog.editor.plugins.SpacesTabHandler plugin.

As I mention before, I find it questionable that the GMail developers elected to omit this plugin. I'm not suggesting that there are some fools on the project who can't read an API. Rather, it strongly indicates that GMail is catering less and less to any approximation of the "power user", and assuming that most emails could just as well be composed in a <textarea>.

I'm not sure if it's because they are demo versions (and my experiences echoes esrauch's), but every rich text editor you listed except YUI Editor actually does _not_ map the Tab key to insert a tabstop or spaces.

[1]: http://ckeditor.com/demo [2]: http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/basic.php [3]: http://try.sencha.com/extjs/4.1.1/docs/Ext.form.field.HtmlEd...

Indeed. All other text fields in your browsers do this, why should gmail be any different?

I agree that it would be nice to have some way to force insert a tab, but it's hardly surprising that it works the way that it does.

The Send button is located above/before the email body. One would not expect that focus is moved to one of the previous elements instead of the immediate next element.

Actually. If tabs are set up properly, then when you press tab you should move to the next relevant field.