Reviews for withExEditor
withExEditor by asamuzaK
Review by dj
19 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by bito, 3 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by gracefool, 5 years agoNice. Editing doesn't work on Facebook for me - text appears in the input box but isn't actually in there - it's overtop of any existing grey text and unrecognized by the browser (can't send it).
- Rated 5 out of 5by gibus, 6 years agoThis plugins works perfectly. An external editor for web form has saved my nerves many times after editing a long text for hours and, for some reasons, the browser crashes or I inadvertently press the cancel button instead of submit, etc. So I was very happy to see withExEditor doing the job, after years of using late-ItSAllText (who passed away with firefox 57 webextensions). Note that the host is to be downloaded from https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditorHost while the home page points on /https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditor
- Rated 5 out of 5by Jesse Hallett, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13133536, 6 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14252516, 6 years agoTextern was not working for me (it was getting errors writing to the tmp file) so I gave withExEditor a try.
So far withExEditor has been working quite well. - Rated 5 out of 5by Smylers, 7 years agoGreat for editing textareas in Vim, on the press of a keystroke (I use Ctrl+E).
A suitable replacement for other extensions that have provided this over the years (It's All Text!, ViewSourceWIth, and MozEx).
The separate host software (made necessary by WebExtensions) was straightforward to install. The default keystroke is Ctrl+Shift+U, which for me (on Ubuntu Linux) is used by the desktop environment for entering Unicode characters.
You can trigger per-website editor customizations on the path of the file being edited: the temporary file's parent directory name is the site's domain name. - Rated 5 out of 5by matt, 7 years agoIt works really well. I mostly use it to compose emails, but sometimes for viewing page source, etc. Setup of the host is much improved over earlier versions.
Developer response
posted 7 years agoWell, that's what WebExtensions requires to communicate with native apps.- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13501365, 7 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 12564382, 7 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13823307, 7 years agoIt's exactly what one needs to edit pieces of code, input fields and so on. feature-rich and easy to use. Kudos to the developer.
On the down side, it is difficult to install, which prevents non-tech users from using it, and it is not obvious to know how to debug it in case of problems or how to report problems.
Since I see no way to send bug reports, I'll do that here: version 4.2.6 stopped working for me. And I cannot find any hints about how to try and debug, or to send details to the author in these cases.Developer response
posted 7 years agoCertainly in v4.2.3 I brought such a bug, but it has already been fixed in v4.2.6.
Bug reports are accepted here, so please let me know in detail.
https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditor/issues - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13747054, 7 years agoFirst of all thanks to the developer for trying to implement such a priceless feature for this awful firefox quantum...
Indeed, this plugin may be hard to install for the newbies, but I didn't have any problems with it under the windows 10. But the problem is that it's not actually working.
I use this plugin for editing the text from textarea in an external editor. When I first open the editor, everything works fine. I save the file, and the text appears in the textarea. But if the web page replaces a part of DOM containing this textarea with a new one (in an ajax call), the plugin stops working. To be precise, it still opens the text area contents in the editor fine, but is unable to put them back to textarea. I may assume that plugin simply tries to put the text in an old DOM node, that's been already replaced by the ajax call, I don't know. When I refresh the WHOLE page, the plugin starts working normally again. So it's definitely a bug.
Thus, it is completely unusable for me ((. That's why I still forced to use It'sAllText with an outdated firefox 56 - there is no working replacement.Developer response
posted 7 years agoWould you tell me the URL that can reproduce that issue?
And if you have a GitHub account, please file an issue for that.
https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditor/issues
Edit: The issue is fixed in v4.2.2 - Rated 5 out of 5by jont Allen, 7 years agoThere is good and bad news here. The good news first:
GOOD:
If you take the time to set it up, it works great. I would suggest a few minor modifications to make it nearly perfect.
1) When you close the file your editing, the edited text in the browser should "light up" like it does with "Its all text".
Note: The reason that "withExEditor" appeared was to replace "Its all text" which was a Firefox plugin that was rendered "out of date" due to Firefox (Mozilla) security issues with plugins and extensions. (Did I get this reason right?).
2) The "documentation" (see below for the bad news) says that you "right click" to start the process of transfering the text to be edited to your local editor (notepad, gvim (vi), emacs, gedit, what ever). However this very important instruction is not properly defined. I searched the internet high and low to try to understand what to "right click" on.
Eventually by hours of trial and error, I discovered that the key-stroke required was a double-right-click of the mouse button in the text area that was to be edited. Once this was done (two right mouse clicks, pointed at the right region), the menu came up, and at the bottom of the list was a "withExEditor" icon. when I selected that, then the text was transfered to my editor (gvim in my case).
Conclusion: The documentation needs to explain exactly how withExEditor is to be started. The present documentation is on the verge of non-existant on almost all points (see below on the bad).
3) So far I have not been successful in getting the "u" option to work. From a review it seems that one should try "ctrl-shift-u" I have not yet tried that.
NOTE: withExEdit does not work on this review!!! I can see the line for withExEditor if I right click, but its grayed out. OMG.
BAD:
I don't know where to start there are so many problems. It took be 8 hours of work to get this installed, mostly because of the very poor (almost nonexistant) documentation. First, if your not a GitHub user, you need to educate yourself a bit. You don't need an account, but you had better learn how to use the basics, like downloading a zip file and unzipping it, and following the instructions.
2) Most important of all is that you will need to have node version 8.X installed. So how do you know what version of node you have? Simple (I guess its simple): From the command line (xterm) run the command
node -v
If it doesn't come back at all, you don't have node installed. Try "man node" to find out more. Ubuntu 16.04 comes with node 4.x installed. I purged this (sudo apt purge node) and then found the latest version (8.9.3) and installed it from a tar file (https://nodejs.org/en/download/).
3) Then the "docs" keep talking about a "Host" but nowhere is this defined (at least to my satisfaction). For this you need to download the host.js package from the author's github site (https://github.com/asamuzaK/). Here you will find a zip for both the app and the host. You need to install both.
4) Once the host is installed you need to configure it, which is done with the command "node setup.js" as described in the README.md file in the host package download. If you get an error with this command, it likely means you have an old version of "node."
In summary, the software is great, the documentation is a nightmare. It left me feeling like I was stupid. But I really needed this function (for reasons I wont go into), so I kept plugging away with some faint hope that it would work once I figured it all out. I have been using Unix/linux for 15 years, and it took all that experience to get through this. I have no idea what a windows user will experience, but likely many of the same problems.
So I love it, and it almost works perfectly, but the install process almost killed me. Now I'm using this daily, and I cant live without it. For example: If you editing a wiki and you want to copy the entire script, then click it to your editor, and save the file. Then edit locally, and ship it back, and OMG that is so much better. Wiki editors are horrible. Same with email editors (e.g., Firefox). I want to know if this can work with Firefox so I can edit my email using gvim. What a relief that would be.
How about it, asamuzaK, is that possible?
Thanks for your hard work. Maybe better docs next time? Don't assume genius users next time. - Rated 3 out of 5by chengiz, 7 years agoOld review: Says Disconnected and Restart if it says Disconnected. There's no Restart, so I hit Reload, this just closes the window. Didnt even see an option to set editor!
Updated review: For one what Developer writes below is completely unclear. There is no documentation. Secondly, this is way too complicated. Googled and found that in addition to the host I need Node.js. I work in software and yet find this complicated. Cannot imagine how a casual user is expected to set this up. All this needs to be packaged within the extension.Developer response
posted 7 years agoYou need a host to use this add-on, have you installed it?
The editor settings will be done on the host.
If you need support, please file an issue on GitHub.
https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditorHost
About "Restart" and "Reload" wording, thanks for pointing out.
I'll fix it in next release. - Rated 4 out of 5by Dennis McCunney, 7 years agoI was looking for a replacement for the deprecated "It's All Text" extension, which I used a *lot* to make posting stuff into text boxes a better experience. So far, withExEditor looks like it might fill the bill.
It took some doing to setup. I had to install node.js to provide the host, and go through the configuration. But I can use Ctrl-Shift-u to invoke my preferred editor (notepad2-mod) and enter content.
One suggestion I'd make would be clearer explanation on configuration. My initial setup didn't work as expected, because I needed to provide the file name to be edited in the command line that invokes the editor. Once I changed the config to specify that, things behaved as expected. For most purposes, I think making passing the file name to the editor should be the *default* action when you set up the extension.
This is a work in progress, and I expect it to improve, but what's there is a very promising start.Developer response
posted 7 years agoWould you please file an issue on GitHub for that?
Thanks.
asamuzaK/withExEditorHost: Native messaging host for withExEditor https://github.com/asamuzaK/withExEditorHost