Review : Mozex plugin for Mozilla / Firefox

Well by Gosh and by Gum, those whacky Mozilla developers have done something that makes a ton of sense. Enter Mozex by Tomas Styblo, a tool for invoking external programs for various actions within the Mozilla browser family. Mozex is purported to work with Mozilla and Firefox, though I've only tested it from Firefox 0.8.

The Setup

Installation of the tool is as straightforward as all the Mozilla extensions. Simply go to the Mozex installation page and click on 'click here to install Mozex'. The extension will download and install automatically. Afterwards, a restart of Mozilla is required to make it active, the norm for Extension installations.

I was primarily interested in the Textarea editor, so I naturally attacked that first. It was pretty simple, post installation, to go to the Tools->Options menu, select Mozex, and then click on Options. The Options dialog window popped up with a bewildering series of fill-in boxes. I stared a bit before referring back to the Mozex example screenshot, and did the "OH! I get it!" epiphany. I really enjoy working in KVim, the port of the outstanding Vim editor to KDE, so I simply entered kvim %t into the Textareas field, and clicked Ok.

In Use

So, now what? I needed a textarea to edit. Where do I do most of my editing, why, the blog of course! Quick, lets test it out. Pulling up my blog editing screen, I right clicked on the textarea, selected Mozex, and selected "Edit Textarea". Lo and behold, KVim came up beautifully with the contents of the current textarea all ready for editing.

I've finished the rest of this entry totally in KVim, occasionally saving to see things post properly back into the textarea of the form, but all in all, this works perfectly. I have seen one minor issue. The textarea itself doesn't seem to update with the new text until it's clicked on. There may be no real way to 'fix' this, since I suspect this is something in how Mozilla keeps its information in cache, but I did have a moment of panic when I closed my editor window, and didn't see the changes in the blog page. Just clicking on the textarea itself updated it.

Just for yucks, I tried also using Quanta Plus for my editor, since that's the 'standard' KDE HTML editor. The advantage here is being able to do HTML commands directly in the editor using Quanta's keyboard shortcuts for various tags, not to mention the gloriousness that is an HTML preview. After working with Quanta for a while (something I didn't have much of a reason to do before), I must say I'm impressed with the UI and the tools. For the moment, I've left Mozex switched over to using Quanta for editing, of only for the preview function.

Summary

If you're working in an environment where you do a lot of editing in Textareas, or are simply addicted to the editor of your choice, this is definately a tool you should have. It's non-intrusive, very easy to use, and can save a lot of hassles when doing large edits.