A textarea is far too limiting of an editing environment for my tastes and I am quite surprised that others don't find it so. When I'm writing and editing text I want to do it in the best editing environment I have, not some crude, barely functional text widget in a browser. Everything I post here is written in a real editor and pasted into the textarea. I can't think of a single reason not to use a real editor.

It depends what you're used to, and what you're doing. If you're mostly just typing in some text, not doing a lot of editing, such as for a short comment like this one with only a couple of tags, you can get by with a textarea okay. Basically, whatever you could do in a very basic text editor (a la Notepad) you can do in a textarea. Obviously, for anything more complex, you want a real editor -- by which, obviously, I mean Emacs ;-)

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$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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