The textarea in our note form is pretty sad looking. It's also being used to author HTML markup, a task for which a textarea is less than ideal. Let's address both of those shortcomings by including a gem called Bootsy.

Add Bootsy to your Gemfile and run bundle install.

Gemfile

gem 'bootsy'

$ bundle install

Next, run Bootsy's install generator.

$ bundle exec rails g bootsy:install

Among other things, this adds an initializer to your project. Edit the initializer to override Booty's default editor options. Uncomment the lines related to default editor options, and change them as follows:

/config/initializers/bootsy.rb

Bootsy.setup do |config|
  # Default editor options
  # You can override them locally by passing an editor_options hash to bootsy_area
  config.editor_options = {
    font_styles: false,
    emphasis: true,
    lists: true,
    html: true,
    link: true,
    image: false,
    color: false
  }

To use a Bootsy editor in place of a textarea, we simply replace the text_area helper with the bootsy_area helper.

<%= form_for @note do |f| %>
  <p>
    <%= f.text_field :title %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.bootsy_area :body_html %>
  </p>
  <div class="form-actions">
    <%= f.submit class: 'btn btn-default' %>
  </div>
<% end %>

Don't forget to restart your server before checking it out in a browser. If you already restarted following bundle install, you'll need to do it again once you've edited the initializer.

Let's add placeholder text to both the title and body_html fields.

<%= form_for @note do |f| %>
  <p>
    <%= f.text_field :title, placeholder: 'Title your note' %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.bootsy_area :body_html, placeholder: 'Just start typing...' %>
  </p>
  <div class="form-actions">
    <%= f.submit class: 'btn btn-default' %>
  </div>
<% end %>

We also want the title field to be focused when creating a new page. When editing an existing page, focusing the title makes less sense. Let's create a helper method to determine when we should and shouldn't focus the title field.

app/helpers/application_helper.rb

def title_autofocus?(note)
  note.new_record?
end

We'll call the helper from our partial, passing in the form object (i.e. the note instance).

<%= f.text_field :title, placeholder: 'Title your note', autofocus: title_autofocus?(f.object) %>

Does everything look good? Commit!