It’s All Text! v0.6+

By docwhat | Published: 2007-03-26
[screenshot]
Get “It’s All Text!”

I wrote It’s All Text! for myself. When 2.0 was released it broke 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 and .
  • 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 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 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.

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145 Comments

  1. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-06 at 2:29 pm | Permalink

    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!

  2. Jacques
    Posted 2007-05-06 at 3:28 pm | Permalink

    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

  3. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-08 at 10:11 am | Permalink

    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!

  4. Marika
    Posted 2007-05-09 at 12:52 pm | Permalink

    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?

  5. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-09 at 2:37 pm | Permalink

    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!

  6. Steven
    Posted 2007-05-10 at 11:51 pm | Permalink

    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

  7. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-11 at 9:23 am | Permalink

    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!

  8. Steven
    Posted 2007-05-11 at 1:15 pm | Permalink

    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.

  9. Jacques
    Posted 2007-05-12 at 11:41 am | Permalink

    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.

  10. Adam
    Posted 2007-05-14 at 1:19 pm | Permalink

    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.

  11. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-14 at 4:58 pm | Permalink

    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!

  12. Jozef Remen
    Posted 2007-05-27 at 8:25 am | Permalink

    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!

  13. docwhat
    Posted 2007-05-29 at 8:21 pm | Permalink

    Jozef:

    It’s on my todo list… :-)

    Ciao!

  14. Timothy Knox
    Posted 2007-06-04 at 4:42 pm | Permalink

    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). ;-)

  15. Guillem
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 4:18 am | Permalink

    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

  16. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 8:09 am | Permalink

    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!

  17. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 8:17 am | Permalink

    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!

  18. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 8:24 am | Permalink

    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!

  19. Guillem
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 10:20 am | Permalink

    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! ;)

  20. Timothy Knox
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 2:42 pm | Permalink

    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!

  21. Peter Radavich
    Posted 2007-06-05 at 7:18 pm | Permalink

    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

  22. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-06 at 8:56 am | Permalink

    Peter:

    That’s cool! Thank you, another option for Mac OS X users. :-)

    Ciao!

  23. yaron
    Posted 2007-06-08 at 3:07 pm | Permalink

    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

  24. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-08 at 4:43 pm | Permalink

    Yaron!

    Thanks for the check there. Whoops!

    Ciao!

  25. cschx
    Posted 2007-06-10 at 9:05 pm | Permalink

    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.

  26. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-11 at 8:27 am | Permalink

    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!

  27. mc
    Posted 2007-06-13 at 8:03 am | Permalink

    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!

  28. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-13 at 8:57 am | Permalink

    mc:

    Thanks for your feedback.

    Can you help me?

    I just rewrote the Mac OS X instructions again. This is what they currently say:

    Out of the box, It’s All Text! uses the open program. open behaves like double clicking on a file. It uses the type of the file to choose the correct application to run; for .txt files, that application is the built-in text editor.

    If this behavior is fine for you, then leave the editor option alone and enjoy!

    However, if you want to use a different editor or to force the same editor regardless of the file type, then you will need to do something a little more complicated.

    Firefox cannot run .app applications directly. To run a program in Mac OS X you need to do one of two things: If your editor comes with a non-.app version, then use that. Otherwise you have to write a shell script.

    Check your editor’s documentation; if it comes with a standalone program, usually located in the /usr/bin/ directory, then you can enter that into the It’s All Text! preferences and you’re done.

    Otherwise, you need to create a shell script. Here are the basic steps to create a shell script:

    1. Open your favorite editor.
    2. Create a file like the example below.
    3. Save it to your home directory: ~/iat.sh
    4. Open a terminal window.
    5. Type this command to make the shell script executable: chmod +x ~/iat.sh
    6. In It’s All Text! preferences, use the shell script as your editor.

    The example shell script. Replace /path/to/editor.app with the actual path to your .app file. It’ll probably be something like /Applications/MyEditor.app. 

    #!/bin/sh
# This is an example shell script for It's All Text!

open -a /path/to/editor.app $*

    Other alternative shell scripts are available at here.

    Thanks again.

    Ciao!

  29. Ted Carnahan
    Posted 2007-06-14 at 2:26 pm | Permalink

    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?

  30. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-14 at 7:38 pm | Permalink

    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!

  31. Ted Carnahan
    Posted 2007-06-18 at 10:32 am | Permalink

    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

  32. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-18 at 12:54 pm | Permalink

    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!

  33. oleg
    Posted 2007-06-20 at 7:40 am | Permalink

    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.

  34. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-20 at 9:26 am | Permalink

    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!

  35. oleg
    Posted 2007-06-21 at 9:43 am | Permalink

    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:)

  36. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-21 at 9:49 am | Permalink

    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!

  37. Christian
    Posted 2007-06-22 at 3:06 am | Permalink

    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

  38. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-22 at 10:16 am | Permalink

    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!

  39. Florin Andrei
    Posted 2007-06-28 at 4:45 pm | Permalink

    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.

  40. Florin Andrei
    Posted 2007-06-28 at 4:46 pm | Permalink

    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

  41. docwhat
    Posted 2007-06-29 at 12:26 am | Permalink

    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!

  42. Walker Boh
    Posted 2007-07-03 at 9:08 am | Permalink

    After installing the Greasemonkey add-on, It’s All Text stopped working completely. Even de-installing Greasemonkey did not fix the problem :-(

  43. docwhat
    Posted 2007-07-03 at 2:35 pm | Permalink

    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!

  44. Matt
    Posted 2007-07-10 at 9:05 pm | Permalink

    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!

  45. teemu
    Posted 2007-07-10 at 11:33 pm | Permalink

    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.

  46. teemu
    Posted 2007-07-10 at 11:39 pm | Permalink

    Update to bug report: I uninstalled the FlashGot extension to Firefox, but the bug I reported remains unaffected.

  47. docwhat
    Posted 2007-07-11 at 9:39 am | Permalink

    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!

  48. docwhat
    Posted 2007-07-11 at 9:40 am | Permalink

    Matt:

    The keyboard shortcuts are on my todo list. :-)

    Ciao!

  49. teemu
    Posted 2007-07-11 at 4:51 pm | Permalink

    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.

  50. teemu
    Posted 2007-07-11 at 7:51 pm | Permalink

    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”.

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