How to change textarea rows height for user's biographical Info?

Question

On the Edit User page in the back end, how can I hook into the text area labelled Biographical Info which contains the description field? I'd like to change the <textarea> rows value from the default of 5 to 15?

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no hook available to modify the HTML for the description field on the edit user page. The output is hard-coded.

One workaround is to use CSS to set a minimum height for the text area. I think this is the best approach.

add_action( 'admin_print_styles-profile.php',   'wpse_user_description_css' );
add_action( 'admin_print_styles-user-edit.php', 'wpse_user_description_css' );
function wpse_user_description_css() { ?>
<style>
    .profile-php #description,
    .user-edit-php #description {
        min-height: 291px;
    }
</style>
<?php
}

Alternatively, we could use JavaScript to set the value of rows to 15:

add_action( 'admin_footer-profile.php',   'wpse_user_description_js' );
add_action( 'admin_footer-user-edit.php', 'wpse_user_description_js' );
function wpse_user_description_js() { ?>
<script>
    var description_box = document.querySelector( "#description" );
    if ( description_box ) {
        description_box.setAttribute( "rows", "15" );
    }
</script>
<?php
}

It would also be technically possible to capture the final output of all of the HTML for the page, then parse and modify it, but that's way overkill for something like this.