How do you get the cursor position in a textarea?

If there is no selection, you can use the properties .selectionStart or .selectionEnd (with no selection they're equal).

var cursorPosition = $('#myTextarea').prop("selectionStart");

Note that this is not supported in older browsers, most notably IE8-. There you'll have to work with text ranges, but it's a complete frustration.

I believe there is a library somewhere which is dedicated to getting and setting selections/cursor positions in input elements, though. I can't recall its name, but there seem to be dozens on articles about this subject.