The Wandering Geek

I just came across a great Firefox extension called "It’s All Text!". Any HTML textarea you see while browsing gets a little edit button on the bottom right corner - clicking it launches your favorite editor (the frst time you use it, it brings you to the preferences screen). For me, that’s GNU Emacs.

To use it with Emacs, just add (server-start) to your .emacs and use /usr/bin/emacsclient as your editor in the preferences dialog. Now when you click on the ‘edit’ button, you’ll get a new, empty Emacs buffer to type in. When you are done, type C-x # to close the buffer and get back to the browser. You’ll see the contents of the Emacs buffer in the text window. Made a mistake? Clicking ‘edit’ a second or subsequent time will copy whatever is in the textarea into your editor once again.