I have just released version 0.8.0 of “It’s All Text!“, the Firefox extension that answers the age old question, “What happens when you give a yo-yo to a flock of flamingoes?”1
New Features
So, this version has several months of minor changes collected together. I kind of lost track of all of them, but here are the obvious ones from looking at the change log.
- Hot Key support
- Configure which corner to put the edit button on.
- The edit button goes away when you aren’t hovering or focusing the textarea. This lets you click buttons under where the edit button appears.
- An attempt to clean up possible memory problems.
- Code is GPL v3
So, get it while it’s hot!
Ciao!
110 Comments
I was looking at the readme and I saw something that made me cringe, in the bit about how to get .app editors working on OSX:
open -a /path/to/editor.app $*
$* is dangerous. If there ever happens to be a shell metacharacter or white space in any of the arguments IAT passes to the editor, the script will not work; depending on what the text was, it might do something completely unexpected. Now, the argument is under IAT’s control, and you may know that it never passes in anything unsafe, but example shell scripts should always be coded defensively so that people absorb good coding habits. Please change the readme so this line says instead
open -a /path/to/editor.app “$@”
(Even this is not perfectly safe, but it’s the best you can do as long as the “open” command doesn’t support the special “–” argument, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t.)
Zack:
You’re quite right. I must have cut-and-pasted that from someplace. I habitually type
"$@"myself and therefore probably didn’t even give it a second glance.You are also right in that the file arguments are under IAT’s control. They can never be badly formed. The only potential problem is spaces in the path, which using
"$@"would fix.I have fixed this is my source control. Next version will have this fix. Thanks for pointing it out.
Ciao!
I commented in earlier version about edit button appearing in nearly the same place as TWiki buttons. Checked and is the same in 0.8.
You replied about making the edit button disappear, but I must have explained badly because this is backwards. It’s the EDIT button which dappears *under* the buttons which TWiki is putting there, which was why I suggested being able to move the EDIT button.
If the EDIT button were on top, then your solution would suit me fine, too. Though the EDIT button does seem to disppear already when focus isn’t in the textarea.
I can just see the top of the EDIT button so it’s not a showstopper, and it’s still a great add-on!
Ignore me - didn;t read the new features closely enough and I can move the button. Thank You!
Alex:
I’ll never ignore someone! Not when they provide helpful hints like you do.
I forgot to bump up the Z-Index. I just updated the copy in version control; it’ll go out later in the next version.
Thanks for reminding me.
Ciao!
Hi and thanks for your work!
I want to report a problem that I believe has shown up since a recent upgrade. When the hokey setting is set to its default (none), the AltGr key on my Norwegian keyboard works as a hotkey, which is quite annoying as it is used as a compound key needed to input common characters (@£$«»~ and so on). If I change the hotkey to something else (like F2), the AltGr key no longer functions as a hotkey and I can easily input such characters in the default text field without invoking the external editor.
Easy to work around so no big problem for me, thought I’d let you know though.
Tore
Tore:
I know exactly where that problem is and it’s entirely my bad. I saw it happening and put in the wrong fix. :-/
I’ll fix it and upload 0.8.1 today.
Ciao!
Okay. 0.8.1 is out. The hotkey problem should be fixed. And the z-index problem.
Ciao!
Using the recent version of crimson edit, all it does is open the editor. Nothing you type there ends up in the text box without copy/pasting.
Mr. Gunn:
Try this test:
Ciao!
Ah, you have to save it first. Got it, and thanks!
I’m on Windows XP and want to edit my textareas using gvim _with_ commandline options.
So I created a .cmd file as per the instruction in your FAQ. When I try to select the editor in the Preferences window (Browse) I get a regular ‘Open File’ dialogue with the filetype set to ‘Application’. Sadly, .cmd files are not shown with this filetype (and there are no other choices for filetype) so there is no way to select the command file I created. I only see all *.exe files.
The workaround is to type the filename of the .cmd file (with extension) literally into the filename field.
Maybe you could add that hint to your FAQ or fix the filetype so that files with the .cmd extension are also visible. Great extension btw!
Cheers,
Torsten
Sideremark:
I put the following into the .cmd file to open the textarea for editing in a new tab in an existing Vim window (requires Vim 7):
Blixtor:
Thanks for the information. To be honest, I don’t own any copies of Windows at home so I don’t test it under windows. I made the (obviously incorrect) assumption that
nsIFilePicker.filterAppswould show .cmd and .com files.Is there no box to change what you’re looking at? i.e. a drop down that says *.exe or something that you can choose *.* from?
Ciao!
There is a dropdown list where I can choose a filetype but the only entry there is “Application” which shows *.exe files and nothing else (for me). I’m no Windows expert, so I don’t know if this is configurable somewhere or standard Windows behaviour - and as I’m @work I have no idea what extra configuring has been done for my machine.
The workaround is to enter the full filename or to enter “*” as the filename and hit the button “Open”. Then Windows shows all the files in the directory - despite the file type still being shown as “Application” - that’s Windows for you
I’d suggest to change filterApps to filterAll and rely on the user picking a file of the correct type. Imho, when the user is changing the editor in the preferences you should be able assume that he knows what he is doing.
Cheers,
Torsten
I love this extension, thanks so much — I use it all the time.
I have one case that always fails for me though.
We use Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) for defect tracking,
and it supports wiki-style formatting.
So I find myself using your extension to enter comments, saving,
then using the Jira preview button to see how the wiki-formatting looks.
Once I’ve done a preview, the “edit” button disappears.
If I reload my page, I lose everything I’ve typed so far.
I haven’t seen the same thing anywhere else, only with Jira.
I’m using Firefox 2 on Windows XP.
If anyone has seen this or knows of a workaround, I’m interested.
Thanks again.
RH
Austin, TX
RH:
Thanks for reporting that.
Is there a demo page or something public where I can recreate the problem?
If not, can you do a ’save page as…’, check that it recreates your problem, and then send that to me?
Thanks again. And keep Austin weird! ^_^
Ciao!
Hi Doc! I just discovered yout extension and it’s something I was wondering about for a long time. Great idea along the lines of the KISS principle, just use an editor for editing text! One is left to wonder why popular apps like Firefox keep trying to reinvent the wheel in some aspects, instead of relying in existing, mature tools for the task.
The only (and I mean *only*) nit I have to pick is having to disable backup files created by Emacs, but I guess the editor is to blame for that.
Thanks a lot!
C-x C-s
C-x C-c
Hello,
Do you think it would be possible to add support for program arguments? With that we don’t need to create wrapper shell scripts to fire up the editor with the appropriate command line arguments.
Thank you in advance.
Peter.
@Ivan:
I use emacs myself. I save off my emacs files in a different directory altogether, since I dislike them littering everyplace. I use these settings to configure backups. It’s part of my Homedir management system.
Ciao!
@Peter
It’s on my todo list.
It’s a pain to do in a way that is safe for newbies and yet powerful for experienced users. But I think I have an idea to try…
Ciao!
Umm, interesting approach to backup files. I’d prefer setting up emacs to disable backups under certain sub-hierarchies, however. BTW, nice to see more and more people versioning their home dirs!
(I use CVS for the “portable”, common part and Bazaar for data.)
@Ivan:
Heh…it may not be for everyone, but I like it. It also acts as an easy way to find files, etc…
BTW: Homedir is more than versioning… it’s an entire packaging system for your home-directory.
Ciao!
(Firefox 2.0.0.8 | It’s All Text! 0.8.2 | Win XP SP2)
I just installed it, and opened the readme page. I then clicked the edit button, and it told me to set the editor. I clicked the Preferences button and set it (Notepad++ 4.5). I tried again, and it told me to set the editor (again). I then set it to notepad. It opened notepad, but after I closed it, the tab went blank (not to the standard BG color, but absolutely blank, and it will not close or open another URL. I set the editor back to N++, and it works now. However, there are two major bugs:
1. Setting N++ as the editor didn’t work in that tab, but notepad did. That is very strange.
2. There is now a tab I cannot close without closing the window.
I’ve been quite pleased with your extension, until now, when a particularly obnoxious bug has surfaced. I’m not sure if your extension is actually responsible, but I’m guessing you’ll know better than I will.
Whenever I press my WIN key while a text area is focused, an editor window pops up. This is infuriating, because I use my win key for a lot of keyboard short cuts.
I’m using Its All Text v.8, Firefox 2.0.0.3, and X11.
Recently when I edit a complex form *without* IAT I have noticed that it will jump up to the beginning of the form every once in a while. This also tends to result in weird cursor problems (disappearing text cursor, mostly).
I’m wondering if this might be related to IAT, since I think it started around the time I upgraded to 0.8.1 from some 0.7 or 0.6 series release.
Upgrading to 0.8.2 now BTW.
Following up; Seems to happen when a page in another tab loads or reloads. Noticed when I posted my previous comment that the open edit box in the Firefox window next to this one jumped up to the home position. It doesn’t happen in a different browser instance where I don’t have any extensions other than RSS Ticker and Noscript.
@fooman:
Upgrade to 0.8.1 or newer. That’ll fix the win-key problem. It was a stupidity on my part.
@era:
I think I know what you’re talking about. I’m working on another bug (involving some tabs never loading their content) and I suspect it’ll fix this bug too. I’m making changes to how IAT hooks into the page to load.
Before it was hooking into the entire window. Now it hooks into the window which adds hooks to each web-page.
I also found a bug that used extra memory when it didn’t need to. That may help some people too.
Ciao!
@Andrew:
I don’t know why Notepad++ didn’t work. I don’t use Windows so I can’t check that.
However, the tab being stuck open is a (new) known bug. I’m working on it at the moment.
Ciao!
I love this extension! However it doesn’t work for me with the new version of Gmail. (Currently, for me at least, Gmail has two versions available, and I have to click on “Older version” or “Newer version” in the upper-right-hand corner to switch between them.) It worked fine with the older version of Gmail, but now it doesn’t seem to recognize the textareas correctly. The floating edit button never appears. *Sometimes* the context menu contains the “It’s all text” menu, but if I try to edit it that way the changes I make in my editor never seem to get noticed by the textarea. I assume Gmail has some new javascript nonsense that’s confusing it… any idea what’s wrong?
Mike:
No, not at this time. I have a GMail account, so I’ll look at fixing it eventually.
However, right now I’m redoing the way the textareas are detected and how the refreshes happen. As a side effect the following things should happen:
And it should make the code easier to work with. The monitor portion is a hairy bit of code, the new stuff should be easier.
Ciao!
Since nobody else answered here, I’ll bite: there’s some sort of on-line demo at http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa which appears to let you play around with it.
What are the current options in the [Character Set] field in the [Preferences] dialog? I’ll rephrase: Is there really, really no hope for us people married to an editor with no Unicode support, like NoteTab Light (Windows ANSI only)? I would love to be able to use IAT without being forced to switch away from my every day editor (which kind of kills the concept, doesn’t it?). Anyway, thank you very much for all your work and responsiveness; best regards.
Rafael Pi:
The current options are platform independent. If you can find out what NoteTab Light’s character set is, you can enter it and it (in theory) should work.
I’m not familiar with that editor, so I can’t be much help. I usually use NOTEPAD++ when forced to use a Windows machine.
Ciao!
Nice work. Works flawlessly for me on Mac Os X 10.4.11 with Emacs 23 (Cocoa version) and Firemacs plug in (for the Emacs keybindings in text areas and input fields, esp. in Wikipedia), in Firefox 2.0.0.9
However, sorry to say, it is semi-broken in Firefox 2.0.0.10 on Windows XP with Emacs 23 from CVS (GNU Emacs 23.0.0.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2007-08-18 on TPAD) and Firemacs. Basically, the edit button does not show up, and there is no communication between the text area and Emacs. On startup (with context menu, where the add-on shows correctly, as it does in preferences), the content of the text area shows up in the Emacs buffer (in correct encoding — working with Wikipedia, I set it to UTF-8), but any furhter edits in the text area are not propagated to the Emacs buffer, and any further saved changes to the file are not propagated back to the text area… So, work is possible by copying and pasting by hand. However, other than that, it is very useful. Because I can use the power of Emacs to process the Wikipedia text, and return it unmangled in UTF-8 back by copying and pasting to Wikipedia. So, partial success. But it would be nice, if it played nice in Windows as is does in Mac Os X. Perhaps the newest Firefox version broke it, but I doubt it, as it was just a security update. Maybe it does not play nice with Firemacs add-on on Windows? Anyway, thanks… — Marek
Yup. It’s Firemacs on Windows, that interferes with It’s All Text! v0.8.2 — after disabling Firemacs, it works very nicely. I suppose the solution, baring resolving hte conflict, is to use partial Emacs bindings only (since I will be using mostly Emacs 23 externally here), by employing the modification of toolkit.jar, specificially the pathHTMLsomething.xml file that contains keybindings.
Problem solved (I hope this is useful for someone):
I just had to enter “Windows-1250″ in the [Character Set] field in the [Preferences] dialog in order to make IAT work with NoteTab Light 5.5. I had tried “Windows 1250″ (without the hyphen), but IAT just ignored it. May I suggest a list or combo box with the «official» character set names (if there is such a thing) for dumb or lazy users like me?
Anyway, all seems to be dandy now. This extension is just great. Thank you very, very much again!
Rafael Pi:
There is a list of IANA registered character sets. It contains about 254 character sets.
I haven’t added it because I’m lazy, most users (except English windows users) know “their” character set, the list is long, and most users wouldn’t know how to pick their character set out of the list.
But I’ll probably do it, eventually. Right now though, I need my new laptop to arrive and to pry my hard-drive out of my old one and recover the work I did on redesigning the monitor/watcher in IAT.
Ciao!
Marek Lugowski:
Thanks for heads up on Firemacs conflicting in 2.0.0.10. I added it to my todo list. Unfortunately, I am without laptop (or network) at the moment.
Ciao!
Is there a way to get It’s All Text! to trigger on other kinds of boxes? For example a page I’ve been hitting is using CodePress as an editor and I’d love to be able to get It’s All Text! to trigger.
Hmm, maybe I can use GreaseMonkey to change the editor window back into a text area…
Any chance for a fix for the tab refresh problem? It’s pretty aggravating.
era:
I have my new laptop. I still need to yank the harddrive out of my old laptop and see what I can recover.
I have on my old laptop the beginning of what will be the next version of IAT. It refreshes in a totally different (and better and Mozilla approved) way. It seems to fix this problem.
As an added plus, my new laptop is a MacBook Pro, so I’ll see about fixing any Mac weirdnesses once and for all.
Ciao!
I guess it’s too early to expect it to work with Firefox 3, but I’d like to point out that there’s a problem with the latest beta of Firefox 3 (minefield).
The options/preferences dialogue isn’t working at all if it’s started from the edit button. The buttons have no labels and there are no values in the input field. You DO get the normal options dialogue from within the addons menu, but even if you put in your editor there, it’s still not recognized and you get the broken options dialogue again (when trying the edit button).
I use this wonderful extension all the time. I often need to enter data
in multiple text boxes at the same time, so I would like to open up
(say) two editor windows at once. Unfortunately I find that both
windows are editing the very same file. So any change I make in one
editor shows up in BOTH text boxes. I’m not sure how much control you
have over the name of the file you use, but it would be a big help if
you could make the file names more unique, to ensure that no two text
boxes use the same file name.
Thanks for a great piece of software!
Leo:
That is a bug! Please give me a URL or an example page where that happens. I’ll make sure it is fixed.
Ciao!
It happens repeatably on our internal Zimbra email system.
I tried to make it happen on various public sites but I cannot.
I even tried the public Zimbra site but they don’t seem to use text boxes there — strange.
I could try to capture the html from these internal examples and send them to you but I am not sure what would be useful.
First off: this program is nothing short of amazing!
I’ve been wanting something like this for so long!
I’m afraid I have to second the request to have an option to turn off the yellow animation. It’s cool, I just find it distracting when I’m going in and out of the editor. Because my editor pops up on another monitor, I have a hard time staying focused on that monitor when there’s something moving (changing color) on the other monitor.
I know it’s already on your list, I just wanted to second the suggestion, and let you know it’s not that it’s a bad feature, I just have a hard time staying focused on what I’m doing when there’s something glowing on the other monitor
Thanks again, this program is quite invaluable and you’ve put out some great karma into the world by making it gpl’d.
Best,
Peter
[edit: on the other hand, it's actually nice when you exit out of the editor. If you could, you might make it so that you can turn off the animation when entering the editor separately from turning off the animation when you exit the editor. Then I'd probably leave on the exiting animation, but given both or nothing I'd probably have to choose nothing. Also, I don't know how involved it would be, but you might have a speed setting to say how long the animation lasts. I'd definitely put that secondary on my list to being able to turn it off though. ]
[edit: I forgot it's gpl'd and I might be able to make some changes myself... do you have a repository for it? I couldn't see where to download the source code...]
re: Jenkins
Hello! Thanks for the positive.
I’ve been busy/tired/etc. of late. Between my new house, getting used to my new laptop and all the end of year festivities, etc. I have been busy.
Heck, I haven’t even gotten IAT to work on my laptop yet! *gasp* Of course, I mean I haven’t gotten my new latest-greatest version.
You can download the source from my Mercurial repository at http://hg.gerf.org/itsalltext/.
You’ll want to use the latest release tag to make changes against. You can try it from trunk, but I don’t think it works at the moment.
Thanks again for the warm fuzzies.
Ciao!
I have 2 problems with it’s All Text 0.8.
I use Startoffice 8 as Texteditor. Now I have edit a Text in a Forum with a Hyperlink in SO8. After saving it, the text has lost the special german Keys ä,ü and ö and therefore there are sinless Key and the Hyperlink is not there. Only the text is shown.
Georg:
Hi! My middle name is Georg, also. ^_^
You have two issues:
Ciao!
I’d love to use IAT more, but whenever it’s enabled and I use the “Back” button in FF to go back from a Twiki entry preview to the page with the textarea (which is how Twiki want’s you to do it), the FF tab (or window) hangs and never returns. This doesn’t happen with just a textarea on a normal page or even a textarea on a Twiki page, but only with the Twiki edit page. We’re using the Dragon skin (lots of Javascript), if it matters.
Unfortunately, the twiki version we’re using is quite old (TWiki engine: 02 Sep 2004 $Rev: 1742 $). It doesn’t happen with the current version of Twiki on twiki.org, so I can’t really point you to a working test case. I guess it’s just an FYI at this moment unless you can give me some debugging ideas to try or having the page load hang when using the back button to a page with a textarea rings a bell.
I’m also trying to get our twiki updated to the current version.
If you can send me your TWiki or a TWiki that reproduces the problem (maybe the same version), I’ll take a look.
Alternatively, you can try disabling various plugins to verify that it’s IAT and not something else.
I have a version that hooks into the page in a different way that I wan to release soon and maybe that’ll fix the problem. :-/
Ciao!
Thanks for the suggestions. I don’t have access to the twiki source, but I’ll see if I can capture and sanitize a couple pages to create a test case. I have disabled all plugin’s except IAT and the problem still occurs (all FF v2.x versions and both Windows and Linux). When I disable IAT, the problem goes away, so it seems definitely related.
Whups! I got confused.
I thought TWiki was Tiddlywiki.
Yeah, don’t mail me that…
Test case is great, though.
Ciao!
Hello,
I am using XUL with firefox 2.0.0.11 : In this XUL file i have used html textarea (using the XHTML namespace), but the edit button which opens up the editor doesn’t appear. If a plain html file is taken, it work’s perfectly. I have no idea where it is going wrong.
–dg
@Dg.:
When you say XUL, you mean a Firefox application or extension? Or do you mean something else?
Anyway, the problem is that with XUL it is much harder to insert the edit button and make it position correctly. I’m sure it’s possible, but I haven’t sat down and done it.
At the moment, you can use the API I wrote for Stylish to try to add an IAT button manually. See: API.js in the extension folder.
Ciao!
I think this is a wonderful extension. One minor issue I have is that the right-mouse action is occluded by the behavior of the “easyGestures” plug in. If there were some alternative way of bringing up that choice menu, that’d be nice. (Shift-click?)
Still - really, really nice and extremely welcome. Thank you for doing such a service for the community.
re: Mike McNally
So “easyGestures” co-opts the left click? Okay, I can add control click. That matches is the Mac OS X behavior, too.
Ciao!
re: Mike McNally
Hmm… actually, I’m not looking for left-click. I’m looking for “centextmenu” events. How you do you pull up the context menu in easyGestures (say, to view an image)? It should be the same for the edit button.
Ciao!
Actually easyGestures (like other such extensions) steals the contextmenu event; basically the gestures take over from what the context menu does. I’m not very familiar with the runtime model in the XUL domain.
As I said, this is not a major issue for me now. (Did I dream it or did I really read somewhere that I can set the file extension with an attribute on the textarea tag?)
Thanks again!
Hello,
I know its only in beta but i was wondering if you had any plans on making this extensions work with Firefox 3 Beta 3. I have tried it and it does not display the edit button.
Thanks
Another FF 3.0 question:
Now that 3.0b3 is released, is there a timeframe where IAT will be be upgraded to work? Do you know when you’ll be looking at this?
Thanks,
-Peter
Peter:
I have a beta version that works. I couldn’t make my previously stable version work with 3.0. If you want to try it out, send me an email and I’ll add you to my beta tester list (that goes for anyone, actually — but you have to report bugs and problems!)
Ciao!
I use “It’s all text 0.8.2″. It’s great - my deep appreciation to
docwhat for this nice piece of work!
I do however have one problem. I use “It’s all text” to configure
Firefox to open a text editor editing *.txt files. My favorite editor
is vim.
My problem is that I can get a WIN32-executable version of
vim to work okay, but I cannot use a DOS batch file to call
my Cygwin version of vim. When I associate E:\u\config\text.bat
(see below) with TXT files, then click on a TXT file, I am
getting a message in vim:
C:Documents [New file]It seems clear that the batch file is passing argument 1 as a
filename starting with “C:\Documents and Settings” — a directory
that I never use for editing files.
In other words, it looks to me like the name of the file to be
edited is being passed on correctly to the WIN32-executable
version of vim, but something funny happens when “It’s all text”
runs a DOS batch file. Can anyone advise on this?
e:/u/config/text.bat @echo off c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -i e:\u\config\text.sh "%1"e:/u/config/text.sh echo "Loading minimal profile, then opening " source /cygdrive/e/u/config/bash-profile-minimal vim "$1"[Note: I edited the formatting - Docwhat]
Thomas, I’m not sure why you want to have a batch file that runs
a shell that invokes a shell script that calls your editor, but I
guess you have your reasons.
If you don’t require this complication, just configure
It’s All Text to use “gvim”.
The problem with having so many things calling each other is that
command line parsing gets very complicated.
“C:Documents” is the first argument in the command line when
asking to edit
“C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\blah\itsalltext\blah.txt”
If you change the “%1″ to %* (no quotes) in your text.bat,
I think it will work for you.
Good luck!
RH
Austin, TX
Thank you, RH. I actually am using gvim now (or rather the
bundled console variant C:\Program Files\Vim\vim71\vim.exe).
The problem is that I would prefer to use my regular Cygwin vim
(and .vimrc) — it runs on Cygwin, understands the Cygwin filename
conventions, and calls external Cygwin commands that require the
Cygwin DLL (such as /bin/fmt). If I keep using gvim, I would have
to maintain separate vimrc configuration files.
(Some background: from http://cygwin.com:
“Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.
It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a
Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel.”)
The problem is that while clicking on file://localhost/e:/foo/bar.txt
in gvim’s vim.exe will call up “bar.txt”, clicking on the same using text.bat (see
above) tries to call up “C:Documents” and exits with an error.
text.bat used to work fine with Mozex, so I went back to check my
notes and see that I actually configured Mozex with:
E:\u\config\text.bat %t
So the problem is perhaps that the filename needs to be explicitly
passed to text.bat, otherwise a default starting with “C:\Documents ”
is used, leading to the results above.
However, if I configure “It’s all Text” using the additional “%t”, I
get the error message “The path ‘e:\u\config\text.bat %t’ does not
exist.”
Tom
Tom:
Yeah, you can’t set the way the argument is passed in IAT. This is because it either:
Meanwhile, you can try to toubleshoot the problem by invoking the .bat file from the CMD line using a path that has a space in it. Use quoting, not backslashes to escape the spaces, that’s what IAT does.
Also, you could try to switch to a .cmd script instead of .bat; you’ll have more options for dealing with spaces.
Ciao!
Tom, did you trying changing your text.bat as I suggested above?
It works for me — I can open files from Windows Explorer or with IAT after I make that change.
RH - I just now tried your suggestion of changing “%1″ to %* (no quotes)
in text.bat and IT WORKS! Problem solved! Thank you!
The Cygwin vim shows me that I’m actually editing a file under
“C:/Documents and Settings/…/Firefox/Profiles/…/itsalltext/…”
Aha - this makes sense now.
docwhat - thank you for the debugging suggestions!
First off, I *was* a Mozex fan, but I’ve already uninstalled it. IAT is an awesome extension - thanks much!
I do have a question though - does IAT generate any events for the TEXTAREA when an update occurs? I’ve developed a site that has a couple TEXTAREAs that the user edits in, along with a “Preview” area that I currently update by setting an onKeyUp handler, which works great when editing within the TEXTAREA, but if I use IAT, the TEXTAREA updates but my preview does not. I tried adding an onChange handler, but that didn’t work.
Then I tried Event Spy and I see a bunch of mutation events (coloring the background of textarea), but I don’t know if I can set an event handler (or if I want to, with the many events the fading effect generates). I would think generating a ‘change’ event of some sort would be a desirable thing, but maybe others disagree.
Nem:
Change works, but only if it had focus and then lost focus.
I think what you want is to use
addEventListener()to listen forDOMSubtreeModified(if Firefox supports it). If it doesn’t, then I could see adding a hack into IAT todispatchEvent()that event to make sure it works.This will be ignored by all other browsers, assuming you check to make sure
addEventListener()exists prior to using it.Handy reference: Wikipedia DOM Events
Ciao!
I’ve used this extension before, but I started a new profile a few weeks ago and just rediscovered this add-on again today.
I liked it before, but unfortunately I can’t seem to get this extension working in Firefox 3.0b4. No edit button, hotkey doesn’t work, etc. I know it’s entirely possible there may be something wrong on my setup. I can help troubleshoot if you’re interested, otherwise I’ll try again after the next update…
I was looking forward to trying “It’s All Text” today, but after installing the latest release (0.82) under Firefox 1.5.0.12 on CentOS Linux 5, it just doesn’t work for me. No button appears on the text boxes. Right clicking text fields shows the pop-up menu, but choosing “It’s All Text” options (including Preferences) results in nothing at all. I tried closing and reopening Firefox, uninstalling and reinstalling “It’s All Text”, but nada. If I choose Tools > Extensions, select “It’s All Text” from the list, and click the Preferences button in the dialog box, then at least I get a Preferences dialog box for “It’s All Text”. But that’s it.
Can you help me out? I’d really love to use vim to edit text in these large textareas.
Many thanks.
I just found this extension and it sounds like something that’d really make life easier, but…
FF 2.0.0.12 running under Mac OS X 10.5.2
IAT version 0.8.3
I’m getting a “Not compatible with Firefox 2.0.0.12″ message.
Any thoughts?
Ignore that last comment. I uninstalled, restarted Firefox, reinstalled and it seems to be working now. Sorry for the false alarm!
Well, it’s not because of the versioning. The version number says it should work with 3.0b5pre, which is the highest it can be set right now.
Just tried it out and it works for me.
Maybe there is a permissions problem on your Mac? You can try the Disk Utility and ask it to verify permissions.
Maybe the JavaScript console will show you more about what has gone wrong?
Ciao!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W......2C_etc.29
(find for wiki.edit.vim )
It uses csh. Any possibility of a script using (ba(sh) or zsh?
This one uses plain sh
#! /bin/sh
/usr/bin/TERMINAL-EMULATOR -e /usr/bin/YOUR-CONSOLE-EDITOR “$@”
On TERMINAL-EMULATOR you can put xterm, rxvt, urxvt, aterm, kterm, eterm, wterm, gnome-terminal…
On YOUR-CONSOLE-EDITOR you can put vim, emacs, ed, nano, joe, mcedit…
Anybody can edit wikipedia. I changed the script to use generic Bourne syntax since I too cringe at csh.
Thanks era!
I’ve recently encountered a problem. I’ve emerged firefox 3.0b5 on Gentoo, and configured It’s All Text to use “
/usr/bin/emacsclient --alternate-editor=emacs” for my editor. Until just recently this worked fine, but after a recent rebuild of firefox (which might’ve been the update to b5) I’ve begun getting the error “Unable to open your editor” for the reason “The path … does not exist.” I’ve double-checked the command from my shell, and know the command does work.Is this a bug in It’s All Text, or Firefox 3 beta, or am I missing something?
I have russian Windows XP and my windows login account is written in cyrillic. So, when i’m trying to use button “edit” my editor opens non-existing location, like this (screenshot) - http://clip2net.com/clip/m2737.....ip-8kb.png
I think problem is in russian name of windows login account. May be it’s worth to enter own path, where temp texts will be stored?
Hi, Christian. I could use some help.
I believe that I’ve followed all the instructions and yet I can’t get It’s All Text to launch the editor of my choice.
The setup:
Mac OS X 10.5.2
Firefox 2.0.0.14
It’s All Text 0.8.4
Shell script:
Editor preference set to:
/Users/aangel/Applications/ItsAllText/iat.sh
Result of ls -l:
All directories leading to the shell script have -x.
If I empty the editor preference textbox, it loads using TextEdit with no trouble.
What could I be missing?
Thanks,
Andre’
@MacGuges:
Hmmm…. You are using as shell script? If not, then I have no idea how that worked before. IAT doesn’t currently support non-simple editor configuration.
There is a bug in for that in the future: http://trac.gerf.org/itsalltext/ticket/4
Ciao!
@the_ghost:
Whups! That is a bug. I have created a ticket for it.
I could see possibly adding a feature for changing that in the future, but meanwhile, that it a bug that should be fixed.
Ciao!
@Andre Angelantoni:
Okay, it looks like
opendoesn’t like the file not existing. You may have to change your script to:The big change being the if statements that check if the file exists. If it doesn’t then it touches it.
You should be able to run the script for the command line and it should work if you give it a filename that doesn’t exist, like /tmp/foobarbaz.txt
I have updated the wiki page.
Ciao!
I went to make you change in the file and instead of using the same editor as before, I fired up vi.
It turns out there was just a CR but no LF…vi just showed ^M and the lines all ran together. The shell couldn’t parse the file.
Everything is working great now…thanks for your work on this program!
This feature does look nice, but I think all I need is for IAT to check the existence of its editor without barfing on a command-line argument. I don’t need to configure multiple settings for emacs from IAT, and I hadn’t been using a shell script before, though I am now. Since creating emacsclientemacs with
#!/bin/sh
emacsclient –alternate-editor=emacs “$@”
I can now use IAT like I used to.
I’d like to point out that changes to IAT’s settings haven’t taken effect for me until I restart firefox. When I would change my editing command to not use the argument “–alternate-editor=emacs”, the error message continued to show my original command.
I cannot get this to work on Mac OS X yet. I’m using the lastest version (0.8.4). If I browse to an executable, none are selectable. If I type a path in directly, whatever I type is ignored, and when I click on an edit button it uses TextEdit and the editor field in the preferences has been reset.
Regarding the bug with file name uniqueness (http://docwhat.gerf.org/2007/10/its-all-text-v080/#comment-3946)
I have also run into this issue with editing > 1 text area in a single “domain”. We’re using DokuWiki, and all editing takes place in “http://www.domain.com/wiki/doku.php”, so if the “random bit” on the end of the file name (www.domain.com.2p2if12e1i.txt) is based solely off of the URL, then this would be why there are collisions. I’m not sure if there is any other information you can grok from the page to add to the uniqueness, as my web development is limited at best.
@Trevor:
Yeah, I’ve debated that myself. I could *try* to use the POST data, but that gets really tricky because some of the variables are (usually) the data being submitted
@Trevor:
Yeah, I’ve had the problem where all the random-hashes are the same because POST variables are used for editing everything.
The problem with using POST variables to build the hash is that most pages use POST variables to pass in the data.
I’m not sure what the solution is except to allow users to write some sort of solution for their websites themselves. But it seems hacky and I really don’t want to add so much interface stuff.
I’ll keep thinking about it. If you come up with a solution, please tell.
Ciao!
@docwhat
Agreed. Without writing some overly complicated code to parse out hidden input tags or something (which are COMPLETELY different in every application), this is just a bug that most people are just going to have to deal with. Either that or every time you generate the temp file, it’s a truly unique file. But then, that would break the “feature” half of this bug
On Firefox 3 Beta 5 & It’s All Text 0.8.4, when I click the edit button after selecting gvim as my editor, it says “Your editor has not been set.” I assume this is a FF3b5 issue? Any ideas on how/when to fix this? This is a great extension, so I hope it’ll be fixed soon.
@Joe Clark
Just restart firefox. Should work after that.
Hi, I find this extension really useful.
Is there a way to detect when a save has occurred? I have a page where i’d like to update a preview whenever the external editor does a save.
I figure i could add an onchange= event on the textarea that checks for the yellow glow to figure out if the change came from IAT. has anyone done this already?
@Nick Thompson:
That’s a good idea! I’ve added it as a feature request in TRAC.
I can’t think of a work around to use until that event exists. You could try the onchange, but telling the difference between a user and IAT will be hard if not impossible.
Ciao!
Hello, I’m having exactly the same problem as Andrew Hyatt above. IAT simply ignores what I type into the “Editor:” preference, and reverts to /usr/bin/open. Also, shell scripts are greyed out by the browser, so I can’t select them by mouse. Eventually I resorted to editing prefs.js directly, which worked. Mac OS X, Firefox 3rc3, IAT 0.8.5.
“It’s All Text!” will not launch any text editor on my system:
Windows XP SP-3
Firefox 3.0.1 (Gecko/2008070208)
It’s All Text 0.8.5
I’ve tried Notepad++, Visual Studio, Notepad, and Wordpad. Every time I browse to and set an editor, It’s All Text complains that it can’t launch the editor. I even tried putting in the full path when browsing.
I’m running as a user on my local system that is a member of the Administrators group.
I also have these Firefox add-ons enabled:
/FindBar/
Adblock Plus
Better Gmail2
BugMeNot
ColorfulTabs
ColorZilla
Download Statusbar
DownThemAll!
FireFTP
Flagfox
Flashblock
Foxmarks
Full Screen Homestar Runner
Gmail Space
Greasemonkey
IE Tab
It’s All Text!
MeasureIt
NoScript
Remove It Permanently
Web Developer
WOT
I have a theme installed, but it is disabled (no theme active)
I can try it with my add-ons disabled, but it’s a pain to do so (hence looking to see if any know issues). Thanks!
I just created a new Firefox profile to test this problem from my last post. It is a brand-spanking new profile, with only “Its All Text!” 0.8.5 installed.
I still see the exact same problem. It looks like It’s All Text fails by default with WinXP SP-3 and FF 3.0.1.
Update: After closing and opening Firefox at least 3 times, the “It’s All Text!” extension is now functioning. Very odd. All of a sudden it started working on my profile with all of the other add-ons enabled. It took at least 3 complete cycles of closing and relaunching FF (giving appropriate time between each one) to get this to work.
On this note, I think this is relevant: The other preferences were not being applied when this didn’t work. For example, the position of the Edit button (I moved it to the top left) would not save when the editor launch issue wasn’t working.
Therefore, I think this might have something to do with It’s All Text not saving preferences correctly until much later (after multiple restarts of Firefox).
Am I just dim? I’m on a Mac, followed the instructions to create a shell script in my ~/ folder that runs fine.
When I put that into the Editor box in IAT (by hand, the browse option won’t let me select it) all looks good.
First time I click edit my choice is removed and /usr/bin/open returns. What am I missing?
Brian
@Brian of London
No, you aren’t dim. There is a bug in IAT under FF3. cipher_nemo refered to it above.
Basically, set the value via the about:config display.
I’m sorry, I’ve been busy with a lot of other things and I haven’t used it as much in work so I haven’t bee working on IAT much at all.
Ciao!
Thanks! I seem to have got it working by quiting and restarting Firefox which also seems to have worked. What a great plugin. I’m doing some heave Wiki editing and having a few decent tools in an editor is great.
Yes, it is a great plug-in after I got it working. It lets me laugh at the thought of editing text in a small textbox, without the inconvenience of launching an editor manually and doing a copy/paste.
Works nicely so far.
Is there an easy way to change the default extension? I’m using this 99% of the time for wiki editing and my editor (I’m using Coda) does have a wiki highlight mode. How can I make the default export to Coda be in .wiki?
@Brian of London
Yup. Go into the preferences and change the list of extensions. The ‘default’ extension is the first extension.
Ciao!
I found a solution similar to the one of Thomas Baker.
What I wanted is opening the Editor GVim under andLinux (since I already have andLinux installed). The problem arised was that the file name with the full path was passed, and I needed a different path for gvim, since under andLinux, I access to the files over a shared folder, so /mnt/win/… and not C:\\…
My solution is It’s all Text calls a batch file called gvim.cmd, the content of this file is:
andcmd gvim /mnt/win/Dokumente\ und\ Einstellungen//Anwendungsdaten/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles//itsalltext/%~nx1
This command uses a selfdefined path plus the filename without the path (%~nx1)
Additional Comment:
andlinux uses iso8859-1 encoding due to windows compatibility. Vim also uses this as default. When I want to edit wiki text, which is in utf-8 encoding, I need to set vim’s encoding to utf-8. For not doing this manually everytime, I modified my script above to:
andcmd gvim -c “:set enc=utf-8″ /mnt/win/Dokumente\ und\ Einstellungen//Anwendungsdaten/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles//itsalltext/%~nx1
I noticed that Firefox 3.0.1 on Win XP Pro SP2 leaks a lot of memory when running with IAT 0.8.5 and Gmail (new version) in a tab. It can be as much as 200-600MB when running for a week or so.
I followed the advice at
https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA:Home_Page:Firefox_3.0_TestPlan:Leaks:LeakTesting-How-To
and kept removing add-ons and tabs until no leaks occurred.
The minimum reproducible scenario is:
FF 3.0.1
IAT 0.8.5
one tab open with Gmail
BTW, I really appreciate IAT and hope the leaks are simple to track down.
@brianc:
I have a new version that fixes this but I haven’t gotten it to work in iframes yet.