How do I add a placeholder on a CharField in Django?

Look at the widgets documentation. Basically it would look like:

q = forms.CharField(label='search',                     widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Search'}))

More writing, yes, but the separation allows for better abstraction of more complicated cases.

You can also declare a widgets attribute containing a <field name> => <widget instance> mapping directly on the Meta of your ModelForm sub-class.

For a ModelForm, you can use the Meta class thus:

from django import formsfrom .models import MyModelclass MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):    class Meta:        model = MyModel        widgets = {            'name': forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Name'}),            'description': forms.Textarea(                attrs={'placeholder': 'Enter description here'}),        }

The other methods are all good. However, if you prefer to not specify the field (e.g. for some dynamic method), you can use this:

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):    super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)    self.fields['email'].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = self.fields['email'].label or 'email@address.nl'

It also allows the placeholder to depend on the instance for ModelForms with instance specified.