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Pterosaur: Full power of Vim in each Firefox text field (github.com/ardagnir)
109 points by airnomad on March 22, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments


I've really enjoyed the "It's All Text" extension that allows you to use whatever editor you like to edit text fields.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/


Yes, It's All Text is great.

A note for anyone using Firefox with Electrolysis (a.k.a e10s or content processes) enabled, e.g. Nightly users: It's All Text is partially busted in that case. E.g. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042965#c2. It's still usable, though.


Is there something like this for Google Chrome? Thanks


While awesome in theory, it seems pretty easy in generic pentadactyl to focus a text field, hit ctrl+i, and have an instance of vim where after you :wq the contents of the buffer will be the contents of the text field.

Also compared to a real vim window this lags terribly.


An extension called It's All Text! provides the same feature without Pentadactyl's total UI overhaul.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/


"It's All Text!" plugin is great for editing wiki pages, or anything with a large amount of text in it.


But only if you use gvim or macvim. I've been using wasavi (http://appsweets.net/wasavi/) and so far it works very well for me. And I just love the sound it makes.


With the added bonus of your already-configured Vim + plugins.


It seems odd this doesn't use neovim. Wouldn't it be much easier to use neovim rather than raw vim to achieve this kind of result ?


It should be straightforward to do something similar with neovim. Instead of vim's +clientserver support, communication would be based on neovim's msgpack-rpc api[1].

[1] http://neovim.org/doc/user/msgpack_rpc.html


Oh my goodness, this is amazing. I'm writing this comment using pterosaur. I'm also very happy that it works well with pentadactyl. Great job! Very helpful thing! Before I was using pentadactyl's functionality to open input content in an external editor, but this is so much better.


I don't have any substantive other than to say, great job! This looks really cool. I want to check it out!

Any chance you'll bring it to Chrome?



At first I thought its just another vim emulation extensions/plugins that don't really work and are almost useless because you're so used to your customizations.

But then I noticed it mentioning that it can use my vimrc!

Wow! Now you have my attention!


Well I'll be... an improvement on "it's all text" (but those trapped in lesser (eh, I mean prefer other) editors might still want to check it out.

Shame that modern content-editable widgets (wysiwyg google docs, Facebook etc) will probably break this (too - they break text input in general).


I'm one of those people that cannot use a browser without vim bindings, so thank you so much for posting this. I'm going to give it a try.

Generally I find that if it's just a standard html form, I actually prefer to have it get piped into urxvt because if I don't want to post it right away, I can simply ':w ~/aaa' and come back later without any worries. Can I do that easily with this?

I also like whenever I come across someone doing something messy in javascript (that isn't being blocked by umatrix), and making me fight them, it's nice to just be able to say, "hey, I'm gonna strip anything I've already typed out of the DOM, give it to me, and I'll give it back when you learn to play nice. No jsoup for you."

So yeah. I like how it is for me. Of course, everyone does. https://xkcd.com/1172/


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/

This lets you edit text fields in a real text editor of your choice.


I have been looking for better text editing when using iPython/juPyter notebooks. This looks like a really cool solution!


You might want to look at vimception[1], an iPython plugin to use CodeMirror's vim mode inside iPython cells. It yet hasn't been updated to work with iPython 3.0.

[1] https://github.com/ivanov/ipython-vimception


It's interesting to me that this uses your native vim installation. I was expecting vim compiled to asm.js!


As someone who cannot understand the attraction of Vim (and emacs) I can only say oh god why... Otherwise, brilliant use of integration between two usually very seperate programs, nice! This is something I wouldn't have thought posssible


Its also worth mentioning that its totally broken if you use vim-startify https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify.


it doesn't work in FF 27.x, but it's a good idea though, integration must be quite good. In the meantime and if integration is not an issue, you could try vim-anywhere which is a more general way to get vim well anywhere =)

https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere

http://sprunge.us/hiFY (personal revision, posix sh)


Did you really mean 27 or meant 37? Because 27 is more than a year old and not one of the long term support releases, so if you're using 27, you're exposing yourself to all sorts of exploits. If you really meant 27, then I can only guess you're trying to avoid the new theme (which started in 29, so you could have been using 28), and that's a poor reason to stay with an old unsupported browser. Upgrade to 36 and use https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/classicthemerestore... instead.


And plugin is no longer officially maintained :(


Is there something like this for emacs?


anyone else noticing the window server process taking up a lot of cpu usage?




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