Southpaw Blog

I’ve finally gotten some Mozex-Testo enhancements that I’ve had in mind for years and worked on for months polished to the point where I feel like inflicting them on the world. So here’s my initial release of the thing, possibly to be followed by a rename and submission to AMO (I like the current name, but I don’t want to turn up in searches for “mozex” when the original isn’t even listed on AMO). It requires Firefox 3.6.

The big idea behind the new features is the ability to customize the editor (and its options) per website. You can setup a set of global options and then override them to your heart’s content on Facebook, Wikipedia, Webmail, or anywhere else you edit a lot of text in your browser (and wish you didn’t).

Screenshots

Here is the Preferences window, with a global setup for MacVim.  The --servername and --remote-tab-silent-wait options cause MacVim to group open documents by domain (the %h placeholder) and open each document in a vim tab. Firefox 3.6 supports a real asynchronous process interface, so adding the -wait option means that when the Vim window containing the domain’s open documents closes, Firefox can update the textareas and delete the tempfiles.

The Globally Enabled toggle lets you choose whether mozex-testo is available on all web pages, or just the ones included in the Domain Specific Options.

Here is an example of a domain I have added just to disable Mozex-Testo.

For this domain, I am using the CSS3 selector :nth-of-type to add Mozex-Testo to only the second textarea on the page.

Finally, for the Trac instance at this URL, I am enabling syntax highlighting in the arguments passed to MacVim.

Video

And a screencast I made – it turned out much longer than I meant, really I just want to play with <video> and Theora encoding: There is a mistake at 15:15, when I use the :nth-of-type(n) CSS selector; it should have been textarea:nth-of-type(2) (otherwise every second element of any kind gets a nice, useless Mozex-Testo icon).

Download it. Seriously.