Chosen is a javsacript plug-in for Prototype (jQuery support coming soon) that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly.

Project page on GitHub

Standard Select

Multiple Select

Why use Chosen?

• User Friendly

  Instead of forcing your users to scroll through a giant list of items, they can just start typing the name of the item they were looking for. Non-matching entries are removed from view and choices can be selected using enter or mouse click.

• Progressive Enhancement

  Because chosen replaces normal html select fields, you don't need to do anything special to make it work for browsers without javascript. You don't need to do anything special on the back end to handle the data either -- the form field still gets submitted as normal.

• Painless Setup

  Add Chosen's files to your app and then add the class chzn-select to your select box. Chosen automatically respects optgroups, selected state, the multiple attribute and browser tab order. You don't need to do anything else except customize the style as you see fit.

Setup

Using Chosen is easy as can be.

1. Download the plug-in and copy the related files to your app.
2. Add the class chzn-select to any select box.
3. Disco.

FAQs

• Why did you build this built for Prototype?

  Chosen was built for Harvest, which relies heavily on the Prototype framework. We're hoping to release a jQuery version of the library soon.

• What browsers are supported?

  All modern browsers are support (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE9). Legacy support for IE8 is also enabled.