Add icon to submit button in twitter bootstrap 2

Question

You can use a button tag instead of input

<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">
  <i class="icon-user icon-white"></i> Sign in
</button>

I think you can use label tags for this purpose. Here is a sample of the twitter bootstrap HTML navbar:

<form class="navbar-search">
    <input type="text" class="search-query" placeholder="Search here" />        
    <label for="mySubmit" class="btn"><i class="icon-search icon-white"></i> Search me</label>
    <input id="mySubmit" type="submit" value="Go" class="hidden" />
</form>

Basically you get a label element for the input (type=submit) and then you hide the actual input submit. Users can click on the label element and still get through with the form submission.

I think you should try this FontAwesome designed to be use with Twitter Bootstrap.

<button class="btn btn-primary icon-save">Button With Icon</button>

You can add an <a/> with the icon somewhere, and bind a JavaScrit action to it, that submits the form. If necessary, the name and value of the original submit button's name+value can be there in a hidden attribute. It's easy with jQuery, please allow me to avoid the pure JavaScript version.

Suppose that this is the original form:

<form method="post" id="myFavoriteForm>
   ...other fields...
   <input class="btn btn-primary" type="submit" name="login" value="Let me in" />
</form>

Change it like this:

<form method="post" id="myFavoriteForm">
   ...other fields...
   <a href="#" class="btn btn-primary" id="myFavoriteFormSubmitButton">
      <i class="icon-user icon-white"></i>&nbsp;Let me in
   </a>
</form>

...and then the magical jQuery:

$("#myFavoriteFormSubmitButton").bind('click', function(event) {
   $("#myFavoriteForm").submit();
});

Or if you want to make sure that the user can always submit the form --that's what I would do in your shoes--, you can leave the normal submit button in the form, and hide it with jQuery .hide(). It ensures that login still works without JavaScript and jQuery according to the normal submit button (there are people using links, w3m and similar browsers), but provides a fancy button with icon if possible.

There is a new way to do this with bootstrap 3:

<button type="button" class="btn btn-default btn-lg">
  <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-star"></span> Star
</button>

It's on the bootstrap glyphicons page under "how to use":

I wanted to the Twitter Bootstrap icons to a basic Rails form and came across this post. After searching around a bit, I figured out an easy way to do it. Not sure if you're using Rails, but here's the code. The key was to pass a block to the link_to view helper:

<tbody>
    <% @products.each do |product| %>
      <tr>
        <td><%= product.id %></td>
        <td><%= link_to product.name, product_path(product) %></td>
        <td><%= product.created_at %></td>
        <td>
          <%= link_to(edit_product_path(product), :class => 'btn btn-mini') do %>
          Edit <i class="icon-pencil"></i>
          <% end %>

          <%= link_to(product_path(product), :method => :delete, :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :class => 'btn btn-mini btn-danger') do %>
          Delete <i class="icon-trash icon-white"></i>
          <% end %>
        </td>
      </tr>
    <% end %>
  </tbody>
</table>

<%= link_to(new_product_path, :class => 'btn btn-primary') do %>
    New <i class="icon-plus icon-white"></i>
<% end %>

In case you're not using Rails, here is the output HTML for the links with icons (for an edit, delete, and new submit buttons)

# Edit
<a href="/products/1/edit" class="btn btn-mini">Edit <i class="icon-pencil"></i></a>

# Delete
<a href="/products/1" class="btn btn-mini btn-danger" data-confirm="Are you sure?" data-method="delete" rel="nofollow"> Delete <i class="icon-trash icon-white"></i></a>

# New
<a href="/products/new" class="btn btn-primary">New <i class="icon-plus icon-white"></i></a>

And here's a link to screenshot of the finished result: http://grab.by/cVXm

There is one way, how to get (bootstrap's) glyphicons into input type="submit". Using css3 multiple background.

HTML:

<form class="form-search">
   …
   <input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

and CSS:

.form-search input[type="submit"] {
    padding-left:16px; /* space for only one glyphicon */
    background:-moz-linear-gradient(top,#fff 0%,#eee 100%) no-repeat 16px top,
        url(../images/glyphicons-halflings.png) no-repeat -48px 0,
        -moz-linear-gradient(top,#fff 0%,#eee 100%); /* FF hack */
    /* another hacks here  */
    background:linear-gradient(to bottom,#fff 0%,#eee 100%) no-repeat 16px top,
        url(../images/glyphicons-halflings.png) no-repeat -48px 0,
        linear-gradient(to bottom,#fff 0%,#eee 100%); /* Standard way */
}

If multiple backgrounds are overlaping, at the top will be first background at the background: notation. So at the top is background which is indented 16px from left side (16px is width of single glyphicon), at the bottom level is whole glyphicons-halflings.png and at the bottom level (covers whole element) is same background gradient as at the top level.

-48px 0px is the cut for search icon (icon-search) but it's easy to show any other icon.

If someone need a :hover effect, background must be again typed at the same form.