What is your use case for this?

In T88976#1033170, @Krinkle wrote:

What is your use case for this?

See T88922: ReferenceError due to CharInsert extension not loading mediawiki.toolbar before it is used

In T88976#1033247, @Aklapper wrote:

In T88976#1033170, @Krinkle wrote:

What is your use case for this?

See T88922: ReferenceError due to CharInsert extension not loading mediawiki.toolbar before it is used

That seems unrelated. Or rather, proof that task indicates that this task is requesting separation we don't need. The extension is using methods of a module without depending on the module. It previously worked by mere luck (ever since MediaWiki 1.17 introduced the module system).

The various gadgets to insert special characters are the use case for this. Currently they have to declare a dependency on mediawiki.toolbar, which will load and initialize the classical toolbar, even when it is not used (because WikiEditor is active and hides the classical toolbar). This isn't a big problem, but I think that the separation of mediawiki.action.edit and mediawiki.toolbar were done for a good reason, so forcing all wikis to depend on and load mediawiki.toolbar because they need one function that doesn't depend on the toolbar (rather the other way round, the toolbar depends on mw.toolbar.insertTags), doesn't seem the right thing for me.

In T88976#1033652, @Schnark wrote:

The various gadgets to insert special characters are the use case for this. Currently they have to declare a dependency on mediawiki.toolbar, which will load and initialize the classical toolbar, even when it is not used [..]

I agree there is a use case for gadgets to insert characters into a text field of their choosing. However the problem, as you already mention, is that mediawiki.toolbar is not the appropiate module to use in that case.

This task was originally created with the following claim:

The function mw.toolbar.insertTags [..] is useful without it (mediawiki.toolbar) as well. The advantage of that function over jquery.textSelection is that it works on the input for the edit comment, too.

I don't understand what you mean here. Below we examine the code behind insertTags.

insertTags: function ( pre, peri, post ) {
	if ( current && current.length ) {
		current.textSelection(
			'encapsulateSelection', { pre: pre, peri: peri, post: post }
		);
	}
}

The above code contains no logic besides calling textSelection(), so I would recommend gadgets wanting to use it simply call it directly. There is no special support here for input fields (one line), edit summaries, or text areas (larger, multiple lines). The jquery.textSelection module supports all of them, <input> and <textarea>.