103767 - Key to start $EDITOR for <textarea> (external text editor)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[Malx]

The best editor is the one, which is set in $EDITOR of every unix user!
So you need to make shortcut (same as in lynx) to start it for
editing of <textarea> fields (or may be DblClick on field also will
do this?).
You just can't make own editor so powerfull as vi :) it whould be waste of time.

Or may be it whould be defined by special option in preference?
 (if so - you hould also think about leting this external editor to get line 
number to start at and charset). So you could set "xterm -e 'vi $file' -fn 
'*-$charset'"

(also tell user if $EDITOR is not set - especially for Win*)

This need becomes clear, if you whould recall number of Web based Forums and 
Free Mail services. Most of them make <textarea> for 800x600 - too small for 
1024x768 :(

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 35268, [RFE] Edit Source using External Editor.

Comment 2

[Kathleen :Brade]

-->Future
Maybe this bug should really go to HTML Form Controls or XPApps (for helper app 
work)?

Comment 3

[Akkana Peck]

Fun idea; it would actually make web mail usable.
I don't expect we'll have the resources to do this any time soon, but it would
be a nice self-contained project for someone to contribute.

(Minor nit: $VISUAL, if it's set, should override $EDITOR.)

It could be implemented as a form control issue (start editor on focus in) or as
a key binding inside the editor.  I'm leaving it as editor/core because if we
built it in as an editor command it would also solve the much-requested
comparable problem in mailnews.
Not sure who should own it; Kin, if you don't want it, I don't mind having it on
my list (but still future/helpwanted).  If anyone wants to volunteer to work on
it, I'd be happy to offer suggestions.

Comment 4

[Anthony DeRobertis]

dup of bug 13474?

Comment 5

[Malx]

This one is a subset of bug #13474
And it is mor likely to be dup of bug #72539

But It could be implemented faster, then #13474 (with all proposed pipes)

Maked as dependens (am I right?)

Comment 6

[Krishna Sethuraman]

Mozex (firefox addon) currently supports choosing a hotkey to edit the textarea.  Works for me with xemacs's winclient.exe using Firefox under Windows XP to edit trac wiki pages.

Comment 7

[Sven]

The new add-on architecture rendered "It's All Text" and friends unusable. Apparently, it is impossible to write an add-on which directly communicates with the browser via the filesystem.

A few new add-ons try to work around this by implementing a server which acts as glue between Firefox and the eternal editor, most notably:

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghosttext/
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/external-editor/

However, this approach is cumbersome and error prone, currently none of these new add-ons works satisfactory across different editors.

Specially developers need a way to edit large textarea content in external editors (e.g. documentation wiki à la GitHub) to be productive and prevent frequent copy-pasting.

Thank you so much for giving this really long-running feature request (nearly two decades!) a thought, proper support for textarea external editors would be a killer feature for many people, most certainly developers!

Comment 8

[Marc Schöchlin]

I really miss the "It's All Text" extension and i also think that the recent approaches with bridging native apps are not a good idea.

Implementing a "edit textarea with external editor on hotkey" should be not a difficult thing and really more secure than recent approaches.

Comment 9

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

In these days, web apps may handle every input with beforeinput event and override the result. That may sanitize input too. Therefore, once we fix this bug, some web apps need additional work and it's really difficult to emulate user input from the result. So I don't think this is reasonable for current web. Instead, there should be alternative shortcut key sets for specific editor users if we need to take care of them.