/textern

A Firefox add-on for editing text in your favourite external editor!
  1. JavaScript 62.5%
  2. Python 24.9%
  3. Makefile 4.7%
  4. CSS 4.2%
  5. HTML 3.7%
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README.md

Textern

Textern is a Firefox add-on that allows you to edit text areas in web pages using an external editor. It is similar in functionality to the popular It's All Text! add-on, though makes use of the WebExtension API and is thus fully compatible with multiprocessing and planned to be supported beyond Firefox 57.

The add-on is divided into two parts:

  • the WebExtension, which is available from AMO here, and
  • the native application, which handles text editor launching and monitoring.

The native application currently only supports Linux with Python 3.5. Patches to add support for other platforms are welcome!

Installation

To clone the repository:

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jlebon/textern
$ cd textern

IMPORTANT: make sure that your git checkout includes submodules (either use the --recurse-submodules when running git clone as shown above, or use git submodule update --init if already cloned).

To install the native app, run:

$ sudo make native-install

To uninstall it, run:

$ sudo make native-uninstall

If you do not have root privileges or wish to only install the native app for the current user, run:

$ make native-install USER=1

Usage

Once both the WebExtension and the native application are installed, you can select any textbox and press Ctrl+Shift+E to open an external editor. By default, gedit is opened. You can change both the key mapping as well as the configured editor in the addon preferences. Additional parameters may be passed to the editor. For example:

["myeditor", "--custom-arg"]

will launch myeditor --custom-arg /path/to/file.txt. You may use %s as a variable for the file path if don't want it to be the last argument.

gnome-terminal

If you would like to use gnome-terminal to spawn a terminal application like vim or emacs, note that you will need to work around the fact that the gnome-terminal process does not wait for the spawned process before exiting. This will cause Textern to stop listening for text updates. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707899#c4 for more information. You can work around this by using the script here, and prepend your command. For example, to run vim, you can set your editor in the preferences to something like:

["gnome-terminal-wrapper", "vim"]

konsole

konsole doesn't suffer from the same issue as gnome-terminal and thus can be directly invoked, e.g.:

["konsole", "-e", "vim"]

GUI editors

Non-terminal-based editors can also suffer from the same problem described above. For example, gedit does not fork and thus can be used directly:

["gedit"]

On the other hand, gvim by default will fork and detach. One must thus make sure to pass the -f switch for it to stay in the foreground:

["gvim", "-f"]

Related Projects

It's All Text!

https://github.com/docwhat/itsalltext/

This is the project that inspired this add-on. Unfortunately, it is not compatible with WebExtensions and thus cannot be installed on Firefox 57 or later.

withExEditor

https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditor

Similar to Textern and supports WebExtensions. Native app is cross-platform but requires Node.js.

GhostText

https://github.com/GhostText/GhostText

Uses editor-specific plugins to provide two-way on-the-fly sync between webpage and editor.