How to insert text into the textarea at the current cursor position?

Question

Use selectionStart/selectionEnd properties of the input element (works for <textarea> as well)

function insertAtCursor(myField, myValue) {
    //IE support
    if (document.selection) {
        myField.focus();
        sel = document.selection.createRange();
        sel.text = myValue;
    }
    //MOZILLA and others
    else if (myField.selectionStart || myField.selectionStart == '0') {
        var startPos = myField.selectionStart;
        var endPos = myField.selectionEnd;
        myField.value = myField.value.substring(0, startPos)
            + myValue
            + myField.value.substring(endPos, myField.value.length);
    } else {
        myField.value += myValue;
    }
}

This snippet could help you with it in a few lines of jQuery 1.9+: http://jsfiddle.net/4MBUG/2/

$('input[type=button]').on('click', function() {
    var cursorPos = $('#text').prop('selectionStart');
    var v = $('#text').val();
    var textBefore = v.substring(0,  cursorPos);
    var textAfter  = v.substring(cursorPos, v.length);

    $('#text').val(textBefore + $(this).val() + textAfter);
});

For the sake of proper Javascript

HTMLTextAreaElement.prototype.insertAtCaret = function (text) {
  text = text || '';
  if (document.selection) {
    // IE
    this.focus();
    var sel = document.selection.createRange();
    sel.text = text;
  } else if (this.selectionStart || this.selectionStart === 0) {
    // Others
    var startPos = this.selectionStart;
    var endPos = this.selectionEnd;
    this.value = this.value.substring(0, startPos) +
      text +
      this.value.substring(endPos, this.value.length);
    this.selectionStart = startPos + text.length;
    this.selectionEnd = startPos + text.length;
  } else {
    this.value += text;
  }
};

New answer:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLInputElement/setRangeText

I'm not sure about the browser support for this though.

Tested in Chrome 81.

function typeInTextarea(newText, el = document.activeElement) {
  const [start, end] = [el.selectionStart, el.selectionEnd];
  el.setRangeText(newText, start, end, 'select');
}

document.getElementById("input").onkeydown = e => {
  if (e.key === "Enter") typeInTextarea("lol");
}

<input id="input" />
<br/><br/>
<div>Press Enter to insert "lol" at caret.</div>
<div>It'll replace a selection with the given text.</div>

Old answer:

A pure JS modification of Erik Pukinskis' answer:

function typeInTextarea(newText, el = document.activeElement) {
  const start = el.selectionStart
  const end = el.selectionEnd
  const text = el.value
  const before = text.substring(0, start)
  const after  = text.substring(end, text.length)
  el.value = (before + newText + after)
  el.selectionStart = el.selectionEnd = start + newText.length
  el.focus()
}

document.getElementById("input").onkeydown = e => {
  if (e.key === "Enter") typeInTextarea("lol");
}

<input id="input" />
<br/><br/>
<div>Press Enter to insert "lol" at caret.</div>

Tested in Chrome 47, 81, and Firefox 76.

If you want to change the value of the currently selected text while you're typing in the same field (for an autocomplete or similar effect), pass document.activeElement as the first parameter.

It's not the most elegant way to do this, but it's pretty simple.

Example usages:

typeInTextarea('hello');
typeInTextarea('haha', document.getElementById('some-id'));

A simple solution that works on firefox, chrome, opera, safari and edge but probably won't work on old IE browsers.

var target = document.getElementById("mytextarea_id")

if (target.setRangeText) {
    //if setRangeText function is supported by current browser
    target.setRangeText(data)
} else {
    target.focus()
    document.execCommand('insertText', false /*no UI*/, data);
}

setRangeText function allow you to replace current selection with the provided text or if no selection then insert the text at cursor position. It's only supported by firefox as far as I know.

For other browsers there is "insertText" command which only affect the html element currently focused and has same behavior as setRangeText

Inspired partially by this article

I like simple javascript, and I usually have jQuery around. Here's what I came up with, based off mparkuk's:

function typeInTextarea(el, newText) {
    var start = el.prop("selectionStart")
    var end = el.prop("selectionEnd")
    var text = el.val()
    var before = text.substring(0, start)
    var after  = text.substring(end, text.length)
    el.val(before + newText + after)
    el[0].selectionStart = el[0].selectionEnd = start + newText.length
    el.focus()
}

$("button").on("click", function() {
    typeInTextarea($("textarea"), "some text")
    return false
})

Here's a demo: http://codepen.io/erikpukinskis/pen/EjaaMY?editors=101