I see the input expand vertically now, cool! Looks like duplicates are allowed, which probably shouldn't. On the tag items I meant that in your demo code you h

I see the input expand vertically now, cool! Looks like duplicates are allowed, which probably shouldn't. On the tag items I meant that in your demo code you have: tagsItems : [ 'jquery', 'plugin', 'tags', 'autocomplete' ], Which is a listing of the items to include by their visible text. My suggestion is to use an ID instead (if they're objects). I ran $('input#textarea').val() on your demo and didn't get any value, how do you get the value out of the input box?