Tag Archives: firefox

Meet the “It’s All Text!” Firefox extension

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Yes, I’m a vim addicted. I mean vim the text editor. I’m so addicted to it that I tend to use vim’s shortcuts even in LibreOffice documents, thunderbird e-mails, web forms etc. with awful results.

Then I found It’s All Text, a Firefox extension which saved my web experience when editing long textareas.

It’s really simple: it puts an overlay “edit” button beside each textarea which is visible only when overing it. When you click it, your preferred editor will come up filled of the text of the textarea. Now you can make your edits, close it and boom, the text is in the textarea.

Wonderful.

For me it’s a productivity boost.

I use it everywhere, like now, I’m writing this blog post in my preferred editor.

The nerd tip

There a deeper tip I use: I’m opening vim from a gnome-terminal.

I created a bash script under my $HOME/bin directory with this name editor-for-it-s-all-text.sh and which content is

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/gnome-terminal --full-screen -e "vim '$1'"

Then I configured “It’s All Text” to use that editor and now I use my beloved vim in a full screen terminal window.

Awesome.

Markdown Viewer Firefox Extension Screenshot

Markdown Viewer Firefox Extension

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I’m spanning the use of Markdown in every place I can: project documentation, blogging, note taking etc.

A useful Firefox extension I found is Markdown Viewer. It let you view Markdown files, HTML formatted, directly in the browser window. It’s useful when you have md files on the local filesystem that you want to quickly preview.

Problem: Firefox tries to download every .md file

I found a really annoying problem using this extension and I’m going to describe how I solved it: let’s say I have a file called notes.md in my home directory (/home/max/notes.md), I should view that file in Firefox visiting the url file:///home/max/notes.md.
At this point Firefox wants to download it and there’s no easy way to force it to use the extension.

The solution is to edit a configuration file

$ vi ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default*/mimeTypes.rdf

and add a text/plain dedicated area with the md extension specified:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:text/plain"
    NC:value="text/plain"
    NC:fileExtensions="md"
    NC:description="Text Document">
  <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:text/plain"/>
</RDF:Description>

The last thing is to restart Firefox and everything should now work.

My set up

Just a side note: I’m running Ubuntu 13.10 with Firefox 26.0 and Markdown Viewer 1.3.

References

The comments on the extension page.