Vimperator: Use Firefox the Vim Way | Hacker News Reader

Vimperator: Use Firefox the Vim Way

linux-mag.com

4 pointslinuxmag9 comments

It's awesome! - except if you also happen to use gmail keyboard shortcuts :(

Does it work inside text areas? The article mentions working inside text "fields," but I'm wondering if I can get inside a large text area and have it feel just like a vim window.

That would be great because then I'd be more inclined to edit certain files through our web interface instead of "cheating" by ssh-ing and using vi there.

OK I'm trying it out myself now. I'm in a text field and it's showing that I'm in "INSERT" mode. Makes sense.

Now normally in vi I could press ESC now to exit INSERT mode. So that's what I'll do now. ESC

Drat. It doesn't do the ONE THING I care about the most: giving me vi-like edit capability within a text area.

I haven't dug around in the documentation yet so please excuse me if I missed something obvious.

OK now I'm going to try the "Texto" plugin instead:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/73747

Wow, the Texto plugin does exactly what I want!

After installing it in Firefox, I told it to use this editor:

  /usr/bin/gvim

Now when I want to edit a text area in vim, I just click the little Texto icon which appears in that text area and up pops a gvim window!

Note that I can still edit the text area normally as well. That's what I'm doing in this paragraph.

And now in this paragraph I'm editing in gvim again.

After more experimentation I find Texto pretty unreliable at grabbing the existing text from a textarea. So it's not solid enough yet for me to rely on.

I finally got patient and took some time to look at the help. When you get into a text field, you just press Ctrl-i and the text comes up in gvim.

I tell ya, this guy has gone whole hog with vimperator. I've used vi for 30 years now and even I was a bit daunted at first. I'm still a baby about having the various toolbars showing, so I said:

  :se go=mTB
  :mkv

So, it looks like I have a trustworthy way to edit text areas using vi.

OK the best textarea editor I've tried today is "It's All Text!", found here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

It reliably places a little blue "edit" button below the lower-right corner of the text area. When you click the button it reliably grabs any text in the textarea and puts it into your external editor. When you save changes in the external editor, it automatically refreshes the text area with the new content.

I also like "It's All Text" for security reasons. It puts temporary edit files inside your own ~/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/itsalltext directory, with access set to owner-only (chmod 700).

In contrast, the Texto plug-in puts temporary edit files in /tmp, granting read access to group and other (chmod 644). I'm not too comfortable with that.

Oh how I wish this was more actively being developed...

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