![[screenshot]](http://docwhat.gerf.org/files/2007/03/preview.png)
I wrote It’s All Text! for myself. When Firefox 2.0 was released it broke MozEx so I went looking for a replacement. The others weren’t very good. So I set about fixing MozEx. It was then that I realized that MozEx had way more stuff in it than I needed and some parts were just a pain to maintain.
The author of MozEx got it working with FireFox 2.0 eventually. But I had this itch because I saw things I can improve.
Now it’s three months later and I’ve released version 0.6.1 now that Addons is back. This will be my release candidate for 1.0 because I have fixed the four most annoying problems:
- The edit button is in the right place. If it isn’t perfect, it’s really close. Even for GMail and Wikipedia.
- Right clicking on the edit button lets you pick a file extension.
- When the user first starts or the editor isn’t in the right place, it explains to the user what happened and what to do about it.
- The rules for when and what to refresh finally seem right. At least for me…
The last big bug I want to do something for, even if I can’t fix it, is the “Mac OS X select an editor that actually is a .app directory” problem. It’s hard for me to work on because I have to borrow my wifes Mac to work on it.
The versions up to now, as flawed as they have been, have actually gotten some really good feedback both in comments on this site and on addons and even from blogs in Switzerland and Japan! Note: I have been told that the addons comments are still in the process of being moved from the old site to the new one.
Jason Barnabe, the author of the excellent Stylish extension for Firefox has helped design an API for It’s All Text! so that you can use an external editor in Stylish or in any other extension that decides it wants to support It’s All Text!
Finally, if you design a website, you can add the attribute itsalltext-extension to any textarea and it’ll be the default extension used for that textarea (don’t forget the leading dot, .). You can see it below in the “Leave a comment” box.
I want to thank everyone who has given me all this great feedback. Even people telling me it doesn’t work is helpful. Every comment spurred me on to make it better so I really owe it’s current level of usability to all of you. Please, give yourselves a hand.
I can’t wait to see what feedback I get next. Yay!
Ciao!
Previously: It’s All Text!
EDIT (2007/04/04): I’m so stupid. Thankfully, Robert Daeley explained exactly what I didn’t understand about Mac OS X. I need to use /usr/bin/open on Mac OS X. Now that I understand what open is and why it should be used, I will finally have that part of Mac OS X fixed in short order. Now I just need to figure out make the close button not be display: none in preferences. Grrrr.
Mentions (till Addons gets trackbacks):
- Circle Six Design: Textmate and Firefox
- Lifehacker: Download of the Day
- Benkruger.com
- ClearBlogging: Save your self grief with …
- [TxMt] Edit in TM: any alternatives to “it’s all text”?
- Anil’s Weblog
- India, Ink.: Integrate Firefox with your text editor with nice pictures!
145 Comments
Hi,
I’m using your plugin for all my Wiki submissions and it’s really cool.
I wish it would be possible to have an option in your plugin preferences to make the browser textarea not editable, since the editable textarea invites the user to change the text there even when he or she is already editing it in an external editor. So things can get messy if one accidentally modifies the text both in the browser and in the external editor.
I think an option to make the browser textareas read-only would remedy the problem.
Anyway, thanks for contributing such nice plugin.
Dusan
Hi Dusan!
Thanks for the feedback!
That sounds like a good idea; I’ve added it to my todo list.
Right now, I’m working on 1.0 so I’m only working on the last set of bugs (Mac OS X: preferences not having close buttons & Mac OS X: finding the right executable). So this will probably be a post 1.0 feature unless I get bored or something. ^_^
It’s too bad that I cannot detect when the editor quits in Firefox. If I could, then I could make the textarea editable again once the editor quit.
Thanks again for idea and the feedback.
Ciao!
In the discussion after the original announcement of It’s All Text,
Peter was asking how to set up a hook for Emacs to (say) automatically
edit the buffer in text mode.
Given that IAT uses a well-defined directory for all temporary files,
it’s not hard to set up a trigger for any file in that particular
directory:
(or (assoc "/itsalltext/[^/]*\\\\'" auto-mode-alist) ; Don't add hook twice (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("/itsalltext/[^/]*\\\\'" . text-mode) auto-mode-alist)) )Edit to taste; hope this helps.
PS. Thanks for the Wikipedia fix!
It would be nice if you could specify arguments to the editor, that would help people who would like to add special options to the opened editor or who would like to use a text editor that requires an xterm to be started, such as “xterm -e vi”. Otherwise, very cool add-on, thanks a lot.
era: Thanks!
I’m thinking of adding a readme/faq page into the extension to answer questions like this. I haven’t decided how to do that. There is an appeal to having the faq/readme on my site, but if the network is slow or down, it’d be nice to have it in the extension.
Hmmm…
Ciao!
Joey:
That’s a great idea. It’s on the wishlist for post 1.0. So give me a month or so. The big problem with that is there isn’t an execl() in Firefox, so I have to escape strings myself somehow. :-/
Ciao!
Somehow the double backslashes in the elisp snippet were halved, I imagine by the stupid blog software. But anyhow, any chance you could fix that, too? The backslash before the apostrophe in the regexes (two identical places) should be double, like backslash backslash apostrophe double-quote. (Emacs does regular string processing on regular expression strings just like any other string, so to get an actual backslash character through to the regular expression engine, you have to double it. The regular expression \’ means “end of string” in Emacs.)
Thanks!
era:
I use emacs, but didn’t realize that \\’ was the same as $. One of the areas that I don’t have much experience. Anyway, I fixed it. For me, this isn’t quite good enough because I have directories hanging around that have /itsalltext/ in it’s path that are not my editing directory.
But I have plenty of rules that do the right thing based on file extension already: filetypes.el
Ciao!
Erm, they’re not the same, otherwise I’d have used the simpler $ … although it’s probably overkill to be correct when it’s all just a file name after all. But for the record, $ means “end of line” (i.e. any newline will match, or whatever is the line ending convention in the context) whereas \’ matches only on the end of the entire thing — say, a buffer with many lines in it, or a narrowed region, or whatever (and the doubled backslash is in practice needed when you put it in a snippet of elisp, but the actual regex is still just \’ so that’s what you’d use e.g. in an interactive search, like esc ctrl-s).
I figured this didn’t need to be quite as general as I’d have liked to make it, and it’s a hassle to put in a full path, but I appreciate that some people (such as probably only you) would have multiple directories with the same name. That’s easy to fix, and I suppose you might as well fix it for everyone: make the regular expression match the full path (i.e. something like “\\\\`/home/[^/]*/\\\\.mozilla/firefox/[^/]*/itsalltext/[^/]*\\\\.txt\\\\’” … and I hope I got all the sufficient amounts of backslashes this time).
trac.gerf.org doesn’t resolve for me at the moment, is the link to filetypes.el correct?
Now it didn’t strip my backslashes!! They should be only double in the above, not quadruple. Could this be a bug in the extension actually? Because the previous comment was submitted via IAT but now I didn’t use it, coincidentally because I got an error message:
It’s All Text! was unable to open your editor
> Unable to open your editor
I was unable to run your editor. You can now either cancel your
editor or you can use the preferences to choose a new editor.
Please make sure that you use the full path to the editor and
that the editor is executable. Thank you.
| Reason:
|
| [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520003
| (NS_ERROR_FILE_EXECUTION_FAILED) [nsIProcess.run]”
| nsresult: “0×80520003
| (NS_ERROR_FILE_EXECUTION_FAILED)” location: “JS frame ::
| chrome://itsalltext/content/cacheobj.js :: anonymous :: line
| 253″ data: no]
[Cancel] [Preferences]
It would be great if the text in the error dialog could be copy/pasted instead of retyped, BTW. (Also, isn’t there a HIG recommendation somewhere that programs should not be antropomorphized to speak to the user in the first person? So perhaps change “I was unable” to “It’s All Text! was unable”, or some such. Also “cancel your editor” seems slightly off the mark; how about just “cancel this operation” … although that sounds too much like jargon?)
I checked the “debugging” option but it doesn’t appear to have added any more reporting. It did actually create a file for me to edit, oddly with an .xhtml extesion instead of .txt (so perhaps that needs to be changed in the regex I posted above, too).
(Actually, the explanation “Remove all bugs” is perhaps a little too humorous, and probably confuses the heck out of newbies.)
… Ah, so it’s in the error console — of course. But it’s way too verbose, because I have a large number of tabs open and I get “refreshing [URL]” for each of them, I guess once per second each?
Now when I click on “Preferences” I get the error dialog a second time /-:
I suppose my configuration is hosed. Any chance you could add a pointer where to look and what a sane configuration should look like?
era:
Re: too many \\ characters –
It’s not a bug in It’s All Text! It’s just the way wordpress deals with ‘\’. If it’s in quotes, it won’t do the escaping. I don’t fully understand the rules myself, but there they are.
Re: .xhtml vs .txt –
The comment box here sets the extension to .xhtml instead of .txt
Re: Not being able to change the editor –
It looks like you found a bug in IAT. You can fix this temporarily by changing your ‘extensions.itsalltext.editor’ in your
prefs.js.Re: The error message. –
I think that the error message isn’t actually useful. :-/ Firefox is unable to actually report the real reason, as near as I can tell.
Ciao!
Very cool! However, if emacs happens to save a backup file while using IAT, the next time I use IAT on the same textarea, emacs opens the backup file in RO mode. As you pointed out, the workaround is to specify .txt or .xml when opening via right-click.
Thanks for a cool extension!
Bill
Bill von Hagen:
Thanks for checking out It’s All Text!
Yup. That’d be a bug. I’ve been thinking how I’ll have to fix that and the only thing I can think of at the moment is that I’ll need to weed out any files that end with ‘~’, ‘.bak’, ‘.tmp’ :-/
Seems hackish. I guess I could make it an option. But I can’t think of the use case for the option so I guess I’ll postpone adding it till someone can explain why.
Ciao!
Joey: an easy workaround is to create an executable file, and call it something like xvim:
#!/bin/sh
xterm -e vim $1
exit 0
just point It’s All Text! to xvim and voila!
First… I love this extension. However, something between 0.6.1 and 0.6.3 has broken it in Mac OSX. I have my itsalltext editor set to “/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient”. This works fine for 0.6.1; however in 0.6.3 it states that it cannot run the specified editor.
Hi DocWhat,
Nice extension, but…
I had been using version o.6.1 in OSX with a .app editor, just by pointing IAT! towards the appropriate binary inside the .app package (”/Applications/WriteRoom.app/Contents/MacOS/WriteRoom”)
Unfortunately this doesn’t work with 0.6.3, (and neither,of course, does referencing the .app) - is there another work-around?
raggedrobin & robwahoo:
Whups! Look like I broke something.
I’ll take a look at it and see about fixing it.
Ciao!
I just found this URL that is helpful for Mac OS X people using It’s All Text!
link: Dafizilla FAQ
FOR ALL MAC USERS:
It turns out that isExecutable() always returns false on Macs. I have fixed this in version 0.6.4 or newer.
Status (updated on 2007-04-06): Waiting approval. Till it is approved, you can download 0.6.4 from my site.
Ciao!
EDITED 2007-10-01: Removed link, since the file is no-longer there.
Love the extension.. but still not able to edit gmail’s main composition area with itsalltext - neither the button nor entry in the right click menu appears. Using 0.6.3 plugin with FF 2. itsalltext button works only in the “address” text area, but not in the subject or main editing area.
Update: tried with 0.6.4, but no change in behavior in gmail. (Btw, my OS is x86 Linux.)
Yan:
Hmm…. I use gmail and haven’t had any trouble. It does take a moment to appear (because the textarea appears and it takes up to 7 seconds or so to appear.
Can you do me a favor and try it this way….
Thanks.
If it does show up, then I think I need to set the default refresh rate lower. :-/
Ciao!
D’oh! Of course, it is my Gmail setup: I guess my ‘compose’ settings default to a rich text editor. As soon as I click on “plan text”, the IAT edit button appears. *dons dunce cap*
Ah-ha. I forget about that. I don’t use the rich text editor and haven’t touched that setting for a million years. Hmm….I honestly don’t know what I could do about that on my side. :-/
I’ll think about it some, since several people have mentioned it.
Ciao!
I write 90% of my text in Spanish. When I use the windows notepad as the editor, the letter with an accent appear as a question mark…if I write directly in the text box, there is no problem…
Thank you for your great extension.
Francisco:
Gracias por la observaciones. That should translate as “Thank you for the observations”. I don’t know spanish but I know Babelfish and WordReference.
The problem you have is that Notepad is storing the file in something like Windows-1252 (which I think includes Spanish, but I’m not sure) but It’s All Text! expects UTF-8. You can try figuring out encoding Notepad is using and change It’s All Text! (in it’s preferences) to use that. Or you can get a UTF-8 editor, like Notepad++.
Ciao!
Notepad++ works very well con el español….
Thanks for your help.
This is a very useful extension, and I can think of one small thing that would make it even more useful for me. Your button will open NaturallySpeaking, but if I dictate into DragonPad the contents are not then saved to the text box. It is a small matter since I can save the text and paste it, but it would be great if your program could do it.
Phil King
Philip King:
Thanks for the feedback.
I’m not familiar with NaturallySpeaking or DragonPad. It seems that DragonPad is a notepad replacement. If you use that as your editor, when you save then “It’s All Text!” should automagically detect the change and refresh the text box for you. Make sure you edit the file as txt, not as formatted text or anything like that. Preferrably as UTF-8.
Ciao!
FYI DragonPad is the text editor that is part of the NaturallySpeaking voice recognition program. My problem is that I have not found a way to open DragonPad other than by clicking on a menu in NaturallySpeaking. It is, however, a small problem. Thank you
I seem to be running into a problem with the text input area of Blogger (blogspot.com)..the text area does not seem to respond at all when being edited externally. (This is with itsalltext 0.6.8..I have not tried it with earlier versions.) Any known workaround here?
Thanks!
When I’m doing any web development work I always have the Firefox console open to display ALL messages. I often see a copious number of info messages that say:
itsalltext: refreshing {URL}
It appears to me that it shows one message for every tab per refresh period. If I haven’t actually clicked any edit buttons, then ITA! code shouldn’t be running at all, right? Anyway, not a big problem, and you’ve probably already fixed it. What I’m really trying to say is “nice extension” :).
Fooman:
I’ll double check that I haven’t left some debugging messages around…. I don’t see any.
In theory, unless you check the debugging box, you shouldn’t see any messages. In practice, mistakes might be made.
Can you verify that you have debugging off?
Ciao!
Yan:
Thanks for pointing out another potential problem. I’ll take a look at blogger.com when I get a chance. I’m busy being sick today. ^_^
Ciao!
Thanks, Christian. And way to go on the new FAQ : ) Hope you feel better.
Oh “Remove All Bugs” was checked. I was wondering what that check box did. I thought it removed all the bugs from your extension ;). I unchecked it and indeed the messages disappeared.
For IAT ver0.6.8 on MacOSX, setting “Editor” parameter to “/usr/bin/open”, which may be the default setting for IAT ver0.6.8, enebles you to open the default editor for .txt files.(It may be TextEdit.app if you haven’t change the quota).
You can launch any editor you want by changing the default editor for .txt files.
It could be a workaround.
I upgraded to 0.6.8 and on several systems where I did this I got two tabs with the “welcome to IAT” chrome page. Not too serious, but a glitch nevertheless …
PS. Your Wordpress thinks email addresses with an equals sign in the localpart are not valid. Is this a configuration option or something in Wordpress itself?
era:
Yeah, I saw that just yesterday. I don’t know why it happens, but I’ll try to figure it out. It seemed to be harmless, just unprofessional looking.
re: = signs — That seems to be a wordpress feature.
Ciao!
I tried a bit of wikipedia editing. On Mac OS X, it defaulted to textedit. When I tried to put in “special” characters such as “ü”, I got a “?” in the original text box. Seems like some work in needed on Mac OS X character set integration.
Dick
Open is just a fancy way to open the file in whatever way the finder on OS X would normally do. .app files are really directories which is what allows the mac to do drag and drop install instead of spewing files all over the place on windows. Thus if you want to actually run the directory as an app rather than merely entering it you need to use open.
Really this is more of a user knowledge issue than a problem with the way things work. You can always enter inside the app and select the actual binary and run that (for instance that’s what I do when I need to execute firefox –Profile-manager). Anyway thanks for the extesion if it still has issues on the Mac maybe I will take a look at the code and see what I can do.
What a GREAT tool!
I have been looking for something to do this for months, if not years.
You found a really annoying itch and produced a perfect little backscratcher.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Hi,
I’ve have a problem using its all text. I’m using latest IAT, firefox 2.0.0.3 on opensuse 10.2
When using the kate editor all is fab.
When I use gvim I get this: http://www.t3v.makessense.co.u.....B6Blln.png
Then tried bluefish and again got this: http://www.t3v.makessense.co.u.....cKF1IE.png
Neither application displays correctly now when not being called by IAT. Gimp has also become infected even though it has never been used as an IAT editor.
So, as Kate is OK, as is ‘konsole -e vim’ (via bash script), I guess the common factor is that the others a re gnome applications.
Any ideas?
Where it works IAT is a great little extension - thanks.
Hi Stephen!
I’m about 99.9% sure this isn’t IAT!… What it looks like is your font is unable to display the correct characters. I don’t use SUSE, but I know that it works with multiple languages and character sets, so I’m unsure what could have caused this.
I hope you figure out what happened, though! I’d be curious to know what happened.
Ciao!
Love the idea but here’s the problem.
Anything but text/html as the content type of the document does not work. I was hoping to use this with the Firefox XForms extension, but doesn’t work because content-type for XForms enabled documents is application/xhtml+xml. In fact Even non-form tags do not work if the content-type (Right click>Page Info, or Tools>Page Info) is not text/html.
Just wondering if this was a known issue. Do you plan on having similar functionality for XUL documents, or xhtml documents (served as xhtml).
Thanks,
-David
Hi docwhat.
It seems you are right. I’ve down graded by version of pango and things are back to normal. May be IAT just highlighted the error. Anyway, I’m happy!
thanks again for the extension
Stephen
Great extension! Unfortunately it does not work together with the TinyMCE HTML editor. The entry in the context menu does not appear. The button is covered by the text area and cannot be clicked. I could fix the button position in the code. So I can actually start the editor. But the changed text does not get back into the textarea. There seems to be a conflict between TinyMCE and “It’s All Text”. Would be great if they would both work in the same document! Thank you.
Hi David:
Thanks for pointing that out. It should work with any XHTML or HTML mimetype. I check the types so that I don’t accidentally mess up a page that uses something non-HTML or non-XHTML.
I’ll fix it shortly. Been busy with non IAT things, lately…
Ciao!
Stephen:
Glad things are working again. I’m sure Pango will be fixed shortly. ^_^
Ciao!
Jacques:
Thanks! The behavior that you should be seeing on a TinyMCE textarea is that there should be *no* button. This is because TinyMCE hides the textarea and edits inside a div or something like that. In theory (haven’t tried it) you should be able to hit the edit html button which pops up a window with a text area in it. That should be editable via IAT.
I’ll take a look at it, but I’m guessing that to make such a page work reliably with something like IAT, it’ll require changing the way the page works if it detects IAT (which there isn’t currently a way to do, though I got some excellent suggestions from someone for a post-1.0 change. )
Ciao!
Hi Docwhat
Thanks. I hope you give it a try. It is not so far away from working. TinyMCE actually keeps the textarea (it is visible in the DOM inspector). I am able to start the external editor with the button. The only problem is to get the changed text back into the textarea.
Ciao
Jacques:
I wasn’t very clear. The way TinyMCE works is that it marks the textarea as display:none. IAT should remove the edit button when that happens. In order to make IAT work with TinyMCE, it’ll have to be able to identify TinyMCE, then it’ll have to force save the TinyMCE back to the textarea (the textarea isn’t updated until the form is submitted, normally). Open your editor. Whenever your file changes, it would have to update the textarea, then force TinyMCE to re-update from the textarea.
I probably won’t be adding this functionality into IAT, but I have an idea for an API on web pages which would let the author of the page add this functionality. It’s definitely a post 1.0 thing.
Ciao!
I really like this extension a lot. However there is a problem when writing Scandinavian letters such as ä, ö, å. The letters are replaced by question marks. I tried installing Notepad++ as advised above but using it made no difference. I’m using Windows Vista but the same problem is with XP as well. Any tips or preferences I could tweak?
Marika:
Hmmm… it could be that the web page is lying about it’s encoding. Do you have the web page in question, if it’s not private or something like that?
Ciao!
Hello, I am using this extension on my Windows XP system.
I have a new feature request - a list of URLs (regex) for which It’s All Text will be *disabled*
There is a certain web page I use which puts a link exactly where the IAT “edit” button appears. There is about a 2 pixel difference, and it’s hard to click the link on the web page. In this case, I don’t care if IAT isn’t applicable for this page.
Is there a way to disable IAT for a given URL (regex) ?
Thanks - Steven
Steven:
Sounds like a good idea. I’ll put it in the wish list.
You can disable the button currently by disabling ‘In-Page Edit Buttons’ in the preferences. It turns the button off for all pages, which is more than you want, but it should get the job done. You can right click on a textarea and select “It’s All Text!” to get to the items you normally get via the edit button.
Maybe we need a menu item to disable the button temporarily or maybe just move that option into the menu or something.
I’ll think about it. Hmm… I wonder if I can detect that there is a link underneath and move the button someplace else?
Ciao!
I just noticed the preference to turn off the button - thanks. It did the trick for me. I use IAT so infrequently that it’s totally OK that I right-click and select the edit option in the text field.
FYI, the problem webpage is http://www.furl.net, and it’s the screen which comes up when you “Furl it!” from the bookmark bar.
Hi Docwhat
Thanks for this clarification. It is more complicated than I thought. Anyway, keep on with your great work. I will use your extension anyway.
Hey, I’m sure you’ve probably heard this before, but on the offchance that you haven’t… WHERE’S THE HOTKEY SUPPORT? I mean really a solid product but the whole appeal of using an external editor (I’m particularly thinking of VIM here) is that you can use all sorts of keyboard shortcuts. I.E. you don’t have to use your mouse. If you could add some sort of hotkey to open up the text editor intstead of requiring you to hit a button… I don’t know… you could change the world man!
Hope this is possible and thanks for an awesome extension.
Adam:
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll add hotkey support to my todo list. I don’t think I’ll do it for 1.0, just because I’m trying to fix the last stupid bits, but once 1.0 is out, I’ll start experimenting with new features again.
Ciao!
Hello, I’m using your plugin for a while on Mac OS X with TextMate as a replacement for Services menu. It would be great if „It’s all text!“ plugin have the ability to set-up keyboard shortcut instead of clicking the button.
Thanks!
Jozef:
It’s on my todo list…
Ciao!
I recently got IAT, and for the most part, IAG (it’s all good!). I am running FF 2.0.0.4, and a number of other extensions, and using FF2’s session save/restore capability. However, when I restarted FF to use IAT, every one of my session tabs turned into “Welcome to IAT!” tabs. Again, when I upgraded this morning to IAT 0.7, not only did my four previous tabs all turn in to “Welcome to IAT!” tabs, but about six or eight new ones were added, all for “Welcome to IAT!” One of them hung FF, and I had to kill -9 it. I don’t know if it is a bug in IAT, or a weird interaction between IAT and some other extensions, but it is kind of annoying.
Thanks, though, for creating IAT, as it is handy (barring that one weird glitch).
Hi!
I use this extension every day, specially for editing hidden textareas. Today with the last update i’ve found that all buttons have disapeared!!
I supose that this was a ‘bug’ for you but it’s a salvation for me. I propose to add an option to activate or not this feature.
Thanks a lot for this magnific extension!
Guillem
Timothy:
Yikes! Okay, I need to take another look at that. I don’t think that it would *replace* an existing tab. But I could see it adding too many.
I’ll have to fix this before 1.0 as well.
Thanks for reporting that it could get that bad. I knew it could create two instead of one, but I didn’t think it could make tens or more. I’m guessing if the computer is busy or slow when it starts, it could create tons.
Ciao!
Guillem:
Hah! I love it. You were using IAT in a way I never conceived of! Cool!
Let me think… I hate to add this to the preference panel; it would be confusing to explain and I want to get 1.0 out before I rework the interface to make it work better.
If I created an option you could add to prefs.js by hand that would revert to the previous behavior, would that work for you? It would give you something till I (or someone else) makes it a real feature.
Ciao!
Guillem:
Another suggestion, actually…. You can use Stylish to make the textarea’s visible (and set them very small, if you want to avoid them ruining the layout) and allow IAT to edit them.
Tell me which one would work. I’m obviously in favor of you using stylish, because I’m lazy. But it wouldn’t be that hard to add a way to flip back to the previous behavior.
Ciao!
I’ve installed Stylish and it works fine. I’ve prefered not to manipulate your work!
In our business we work with an application that opens a new window with a text editor (very slow). This text is stored in a hidden textarea in the main window. Since we’ve find your extension we are able to edit this text without opening this editor and losing the time it required.
Thanks for making our life better!
Thanks for taking a look! I really love IAT, and want to see it kick @ss! And like I say, I run about fifteen or so extensions besides IAT, so it is possible that the problem is an unintended interaction between them. In case it helps, besides IAT 0.7, I am running:
Adblock 0.5.3.043
Copy as HTML Link 1.1
DOM Inspector 1.8.1.4
DownThenAll! 0.9.9.10
Firebug 1.05
Flashblock 1.5.3.1
Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807L
Greasemonkey 0.6.9.20070507.0
Long Titles 1.2.4
Save Text Area 0.4.5
Selenium IDE 0.8.7
Stylish 0.5.1
Tab Mix Plus 0.3.5.2
Tab URL Copier 1.1.8.20061010
Talkback 2.0.0.4
ViewSourceWith 0.0.9
Web Developer 1.1.3
XML Developer Toolbar 0.2
Again, thanks!
Hey! Opening all these apps in OSX is great, but what if I want vim in a terminal? My solution: Use a shell script to run an AppleScript to open a terminal, instruct it to run vim, and close when I exit the editor.
Hacky, sure. It works though.
vim.scpt is for iTerm, Terminal.scpt is for MacOSX Terminal.app
http://still.hungry.com/peter/itsalltext/
HTH,
-Peter
Peter:
That’s cool! Thank you, another option for Mac OS X users.
Ciao!
on chrome://itsalltext/content/readme.xhtml you have this line
These both do not support sane encodings. I recommend getting something like Notpad++ for editing in UTF-8 instead.
You wrote notpad++ instead of notEpad++
The plugin is wonderfull!! ThX
Yaron!
Thanks for the check there. Whoops!
Ciao!
Hey, very useful extension but I had to uninstall it because every time it updated to a new version it would reload all my saved tabs with some IAT info page and delete the back button history (?). I got tired of losing everything I had open, so I had to get rid of IAT.
Okay,
That’s it. I give up. I cannot get the readme tab to work sanely across all computers. It needs to die a horrible death. I’ll add a readme menu item or something.
Ciao!
Can someone restate the Macos directions on a more user-oriented level? I’m not sure what ‘usr/bin’ refers to. For instance, it doesn’t appear in any Open dialogs. I have 7.2 installed currently.
Thanks!
mc:
Thanks for your feedback.
Can you help me?
I just rewrote the Mac OS X instructions again. This is what they currently say:
Thanks again.
Ciao!
I have a problem that only occurs with It’s All Text enabled. After about 10-15 seconds, whether I am typing or not (though more frequently when I type in the textarea) the textarea will lose focus. Then further keystrokes will cause the screen to jerk around. I’m running a few other add-ons, but nothing that messes with input methods at all. Any ideas?
Ted:
How interesting. I haven’t heard of something like that before. I don’t think it’s IAT. Could it be something outside the browser? Some other application that is momentarily stealing the focus from Firefox and then giving it back?
Very odd. Can you give me more info? OS, FF version, IAT version? As I said, I doubt it’s IAT but if you include this info, maybe someone else may report similar problems or know what the cause is.
Ciao!
I’m running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), Firefox 2.0.0.4, IAT 0.7.2. I’ve reproduced the problem without any other desktop applications running, so I don’t think something is stealing the focus. Also, the window decoration doesn’t change color as if the focus was grabbed by another application. It looks much more like the focus leaves the textarea but stays with Firefox. It doesn’t happen all the time, and I’ll try to narrow down the cause. If I can figure out the circumstances under which it can be reproduced, I’ll let you know. Thanks, Ted
Ted:
Thanks. If it is an IAT problem, I want to nix it. Very strange behavior though. Because I don’t do any focus or anything. I have an onblur on onfocus event added to the textarea, but that should react to changes not cause them.
Ciao!
Hey, I’m sorry to be a bad news bearer, but your great extension seems to leak some memory - I have finished with 300M after viewing about 200 pages. It may due to interaction with my other extensions, but with IAT disabled Firefox (2.0.0.4 on XP with 512M RAM) stays at 60M all day long. I have not tested the last version though - sorry if it is a false alert.
Oleg:
You’re probably right. I have noticed something similar, though I work with HUGE web pages so in my case it’s not necessarily a memory leak.
I have noticed though that while it gets up around 300M or so, it doesn’t grow without bounds which implies that it just might be memory that Firefox doesn’t like to recover.
I’ve been looking for problems. Things I have tried include:
I just found these two articles while searching for the above articles and should probably try using them:
You may have noticed most of these tools are aimed at a lower level than I’m working at. I’d like more tools that worked at the JavaScript level.
It seems David Baron is the guru of memory leaks. If I don’t have more luck, maybe I’ll for help.
Ciao!
I’m not quite sure about your window.addEventListener( “unload”, … that.monitor.unwatch( event.originalTarget||document ); … ) , because windows “unload” event is fired in a rather strange (for me) way, probably related to caching. AFAIK, it is not fired on every page you leave, so many event listeners can remain registered and leak memory.
But I’m all except a guru of memory leaks:)
Oleg,
Yeah. The unload event fires at weird times. It also (along with load) fires more times than one would expect because there are a bunch of ‘micro’ documents created and destroyed (as near as I can tell).
One of the things that maybe causing problems is my XPCOM usage. I wish that the documentation on developer.mozilla.org included patterns for safe usage of them elements. :-/
Ciao!
Hi Christian,
what about Thunderbird?
I use It’s All Text all day. But recently I started using Thunderbird instead of Webmail. There is an Extension similar to It’s All Text for Thunderbird called External Editor (http://globs.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=2) but it is not that good.
Would it be much work to transfer It’s All Text to Thunderbird?
Thanks for this wonderfull application.
Best regards
Christian
Hi Christian,
Good name you have there (for everyone else’s benefit, I’m not talking to myself).
I have added this to my todo list. The code can handle chrome; I made that change so it works with stylish. The biggest problem is figuring out where to put the buttons, etc. I can’t make it work the way it does on web pages because XUL chrome is harder to manipulate without messing up the whole flow.
Ciao!
What is the reason why the refresh time is set by default to 3?
I always set it to 1, works better this way, and I had no problem whatsoever.
Please add .php to the list of file extensions. .html is there, .js is there, seems natural to add .php as well.
Just my $0.02
Florin Andrei:
re: refresh time set to 3 seconds.
The reason is that it uses CPU time. For each window open, it has a checker. If you are using a desktop, having it run once a second isn’t horrible.
If you run a laptop, setting this to 100 and waving the mouse over the textarea may be better; it’ll use less power.
re: .php extension
No problem! You can do it yourself! Go into the preferences Tools -> It’s All Text! -> Preferences… and add the extension!
Ciao!
After installing the Greasemonkey add-on, It’s All Text stopped working completely. Even de-installing Greasemonkey did not fix the problem
Walker Boh:
I use greasemonkey all the time. I don’t think it could effect IAT, but I’m not sure how IAT has stopped working for you.
Can you give me more information?
Firefox Version #
IAT version #
Greasemonkey version #
What Happened?
What did you expect to happen?
Ciao!
Great extension. I use it to launch GVIM. Works fine with /usr/bin/open on Mac provided I specify GVIM as the application to open txt files.
I have to say, though, that the lack of a keyboard shortcut to launch the desired text editor really cripples an otherwise brilliant add-on.
Nonetheless, thanks a million!
I installed v0.7.3 of IAT to my Firefox, v2.0.0.4 for Windows. It works mostly fine when I’m editing our internal wiki for editing (MediaWiki v1.7.1, PHP v5.1.2 (cgi-fcgi), MySQL v5.0.20a-nt).
That is, when I edit a single section of a wiki article, the page opens up normally, with the text displayed in the edit box. The IAT “edit” gumdrop is in the right place, and everything works as it should.
However, when I press the “edit” button at the top of the article, to edit the whole article instead of a single section, what happens is this: Firefox displays a pop-up dialog, called “Opening index.php”, and saying: “You have chosen to open index.php, which is a: PHP file from [the URL]. What should Firefox do with this file?” The given choices are “Open with [Browse button here”, “FlashGot” (another extension I have, but deinstalled, still appearing as a grayed-out zombie, and “Save to Disc”. There is no way to get expected page to appear, that is, the normal wiki edit page with the editbox.
This behaviour only started after I installed IAT a short while ago today.
Update to bug report: I uninstalled the FlashGot extension to Firefox, but the bug I reported remains unaffected.
teemu:
The problem you are seeing isn’t due to any extension in Firefox. It’s the webserver that is misconfigured. I’m guessing that the PHP extension was uninstalled or something similar.
Firefox is saying that the file is being served as “PHP” instead of HTML. If PHP was working, it would interpret the PHP and PHP sets the type to HTML.
Ciao!
Matt:
The keyboard shortcuts are on my todo list.
Ciao!
Thanks for the reply, docwhat. That must be what’s wrong, since the problem persisted even after I uninstalled IAT and rebooted the computer, and editing a Wikipedia article works fine.
It’s just strange that editing a section of an article in our internal Wiki still works, and that I started the problem right after installing IAT, not before. But I’ll check with our IT department about the web server configuration.
Actually, investigating the problem further, it does seem that the problem is a side effect of installing IAT.
The problem started occurring yesterday, at the very point when I installed IAT. Nothing in our web server or MediaWiki configuration changed yesterday, and editing sections of wiki pages, whose URL is also “.php?”, works fine.
Furthermore, editing the same wiki page using Internet Explorer works fine.
The problem persisted even after I deinstalled Firefox, rebooted, and reinstalled it.
The problem persists even after I’ve followed the advice in article http://kb.mozillazine.org/Open.....ng_plugins. (On the browser, the setting browser.download.pluginOverrideTypes was unchanged (naturally, since I had reinstalled the browser), and there was no setting plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types.) I then renamed my profile’s mimeTypes.rdf (whose contents had no reference to the .php filetype, anyway).
So, it seems there’s some weird interaction between IAT and the Firefox browser that causes this problem with URLs that include “.php”.
Is it possible to make ITA installable under seamonkay?
teemu:
I really have no idea how IAT could be causing this. It doesn’t mean it isn’t, but it’s sort of like saying that changing your car’s radio station is causing your tires to loose pressure. If there is a causal relationship, it is complicated and unpredictable.
When you uninstall IAT (not disable it) then the files are removed, nothing is left. There will be some preferences set in prefs.js, but they all start with “extensions.itsalltext” and should have zero effect on Mozilla.
So here’s what we know for sure:
If you have access to wget (windows download) try running this command (changing the URL from my homepage to the URL of the page you are trying to view):
# wget -O- -q --save-headers http://docwhat.gerf.org/You should see a line like:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8If you get some other Content-Type other than “text/html” then that is the problem. The charset shouldn’t be relevant to this problem.
If the above turns up nothing and you absolutely feel that it might be IAT, you can:
Ciao!
PS: This website is all PHP and it isn’t causing any problems for you.
Michael Kesper:
Yes it is, however some of the facilities (overlays, etc.) are different. I’ll probably do this after I finish my current round of bug fixing. :-/ It’ll be in my todo list, though.
Ciao!
An option to disable the yellow animation would be nice.
sa:
Really? Awww… I’m bummed. I figured that was the least dislikable feature!
*sigh* Adding it to my todo list…
Ciao!
Great extension! One quick question - is there an easy way to set the default file extension to
something other than ‘.txt’? I find I’m usually typing in text areas where ‘.html’ would be more
appropriate.
Rampion:
Absolutely! Either right click on the “edit” button or right click in the textarea and select “It’s All Text!” and choose from the existing extensions or add a new one! You can also edit the list of extensions via the preferences.
Ciao!
Hi,
thanks for the great plugin - it’s really helpful and worth to work on it!
I have one Problem: I’m using the plugin InFormEnter as well as It’s all text. InFormEnter puts a button right after each form field. It’s helping to put predefined text into each form field. After installing It’s all Text the InFormEnter Plugin puts TWO buttons after each textarea form field. I’m no programmer, but it looks like that some process modifying the webpage is processed double.
Maybe you can discuss the problem with the programmer of InFormEnter.
best thomas