Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - chromium

Edit with Emacs v1.13 now available

2013-11-08T14:05:00+00:00

I've just pushed the latest version of Edit with Emacs to the Chrome App Store. Hopefully most people are already tracking the latest edit-server.el via MELPA but this does introduce a few minor fixes to the extension itself. A new piece of functionality is the ability to trigger bringing Emacs to the foreground from a key-stroke within Chrome. I added this to support running Emacs on ChromeOS which together with my chromebooks.el package gives me a rather nice development environment without having to dump ChromeOS.

So new for v1.13

Extension

* Change the handling of hidden elements (fix bug #78)
* Add debugging for erroneous hidden text areas (#93)
* Add keyboard shortcut to bring Emacs to foreground
* Pass clipboard contents to foreground request

edit-server.el

* add advice to save-buffers-kill-emacs to avoid prompting on shutdown
* add autoload cookies
* fix bug with format chars in url (#80)
* don't call kill buffer hooks twice (#92)
* don't set-buffer-multibyte on process buffer
* support the "foreground" request with optional clipboard contents

Get the latest from the Chrome Webstore.

Edit with Emacs v1.10 released

2011-11-06T20:25:00+00:00

I received a bunch of feedback and patches from my last announcement but I think all the outstanding bugs are now squashed. The edit-server.el has seen some love to make it more idiomatically correct for elisp. The main change is new code to handle editable DIV tags beloved of such sites as Google+ (which you are welcome to follow me on, maybe I should have an elisp circle?).

A big cosmetic change is a brand new settings page which looks less like a web-form from the early 90's and more like part of Chrome. Alas I can take no credit for this but can thank Frank Kohlhepp's fancy-settings library. In fact a lot of the credit should go to third party libraries like jQuery and of course the growing list of contributors who have submitted code for merging.

So the final changelog for 1.10 is:

Extension

* Ignore textareas marked as read only
* Don't tag areas that are not visible
* General clean-up to use jQuery to find elements
* Explicit CSS for edit button to override page settings
* Handle editable DIV blocks (e.g. Google+)
* Optimise the finding of text areas for highly dynamic pages
* Revamp the settings page with "Fancy Settings"

edit-server.el

* Allow customisation of edit-server-default-major-mode
* Allow edit mode to be set by matched URL
* Tweak detection of MacOS X Emacsen
* Change behaviour of C-x C-s to save to kill-ring
* Persist the buffer-local variables beyond mode changes
* Setup keymap within defvar
* Clean-ups to code to be more idiomatic.

Chromium Privacy Plugin

2011-01-10T14:50:00+00:00

Did you know every time you see a Facebook/Twitter/Social Media-de-jour button on a web-page it's reporting your visiting patterns to home base? If you thought Ad tracking was a worrying invasion of your privacy then just consider how much info Facebook has on you along with your browsing history?

While things like incognito mode have their place I'd rather reduce the amount of information sites collect on me by default. Enter the Disconnect extension for Chrome. Simple and easy to use it offers a single click button to re-enable those buttons should you want to "Like" something.

Edit with Emacs v1.8

2010-08-19T11:10:00+01:00

After a relatively quiet period a number of patches have flowed my way so I thought it was worth pushing out a new version. Perhaps the most "important" feature is the edit box flashing and fading from yellow after being updated (like It's All Text). It wasn't that hard to do given jQuery and the colour animation plugin do all the heavy lifting.

We've added a new hook to the edit-server for pre-edit customisation. If anyone has some nice examples of using the various hooks it would great if you could add examples at the emacs wiki.

As ever the extension can be found at the Chrome Extensions site. Development versions are hosted at github.

Full Change Log

v1.8

Extension

* Added option to enable/disable visual edit boxes
* Improved feedback as editable elements come in and out of focus
* Updated text box will now fade from yellow after an update

edit-server.el

* Added edit-server-start-hook for additional customisation when edit starts

Edit with Emacs v1.7

2010-07-29T15:31:00+01:00

It's been a while so I released a new version of Edit with Emacs for Google Chrome(ium). To be honest most of the changes are to edit-server.el. The most major change is moving all the frame configuration options into a single edit-server-new-frame-alist which might cause confusion if people don't read the change log which is:

Extension

* New icon state. Blue=Waiting, Green=In Progress, Red=Error

* Improved mouse-over text for icon to give more useful feedback

edit-server.el

* Move all frame customisation into edit-server-new-frame-alist
* Don't ask user before closing emacs and network process
* Just skip creating new network process if it's already running
* Make sure edit buffer is selected on new frames
* Prompt window manager to bring new frames to the top of the stack (X windows only)
* Enable multi-byte mode on edit buffers for better unicode handling
* Explicitly fail on XEmacs if make-network-process isn't found (XEmacs patches welcome)

Update on Emacs Chrome

2009-12-21T13:49:00+00:00

In my spare time I've been mostly bashing away at trying to implement an edit server for the Emacs Chrome extension in Emacs Lisp. It's taking longer than I hoped mainly as it's the first time I've ever tried to use the Emacs Lisp Debugger and it's fairly alien compared to the usual functional GDB's of the world which I'm used to. The current version should be pushing canned response back to every edit request but for some reason it's not working. Once the basics are working the rest is just cleanup :-)

In the meantime I've pushed a few additional updates to the repo. The first makes the extension usable on multiple tabs by passing the "port" back to the XmlHttp handler. You would think being an Emacs user I'd be used to the first class function paradigm by now but it's not something I really get a chance to use much in the day job. I'm not sure if:

function contentTalking(port)
{
    port.onMessage.addListener(function(msg, port) {
        handleContentMessages(msg,port);
    });
}

is the correct way way to pass parameters from the local function's scope to the listener function's scope but I'm not sure how else you'd do it. Certainly the pattern of declaring functions in-line seems to be very common in the world of Javascript (as well as Emacs Lisp via the lambda () directive). If you look at the earlier version of the code you'll see my C habits come through, after all it's just a pointer :-).

I've also tweaked the pycl.py edit server code to handle running on Python 2.5 as my work box is running a fairly old Hardy Heron. Anyway the latest results of my hacking can, as always be seen on github.

EDIT TO ADD: Well that seems to be working now. I was getting confused in my use of car/cdr which is probably a result of too much Forth when I was younger. They are not equivalent to grabbing the first and next bits off the stack. Specifically cdr returns a list, so you had better munge it to what you want if it's not a list.

End to End Connectivity

2009-12-16T23:22:00+00:00

We had a slight degree of excitement this evening when we got home. All the power was out and the refrigerating appliances were slowing defrosting. Due to the randomness of the breakers tripping we thought it was the boiler. As it happened it was a earth-neutral leakage that was causing the craziness. Once that was all sorted out I sacked off doing the washing-up to do a little more tweaking.

I'm almost there with the Chromium extension. I based it on the work done by David Hilley and basically further hacked it about to make it work more like It's All Text on Firefox. I'm still using David's Python 2.6 shim layer to handle the edit requests until I can get around to implementing an elisp one for Emacs. Don't let my intention to do write one stop any readers from doing so in the meantime should you wish :-).

It works if you stick to one page, currently it gets confused if you have multiple pages open which have sent edit requests. This is because the xmlcomms.js function which handles farming out the edit requests has a single reply_port parameter which will point to the port of the last page to connect to the master extension. I'll need to come up with a slightly neater solution but I'm fairly crusty on Javascript.

Hopefully I'll get around to packaging it up properly in the next few days. In the meantime you can run it from a git checkout by pointing the Extensions page at it via "Load Unpacked Extension".

Still it's my first Chromium extension so I feel quite proud of myself :-)

What's in your Browser?

2009-11-26T11:16:00+00:00

The official Chrome Extensions page is coming and soon I'll be seriously considering making a switch to my default browser setting. While Chromium (the open source component of Chrome) is a fantastically speedy, low memory and nimble browser it's lack of extensions if the main thing holding me back from making the fully committed switch. I already use it to access my various Google applications and it's also useful for accessing last.fm radio as when the Flash plugin goes mad I don't have to kill my entire browsing session. With the discovery of the Greasemonkey based AdSweep I can even move my Google Reader browsing across to Chromium without suffering from animated banner induced madness.

However Firefox still has a number of killer Add-On's which would need to be ported before I can throw the switch. These include:

Firebug

Firebug has become an indispensable tool as I've done more JavaScript based hacking. I literally would not attempt to develop anything client side scripting based without this tool by my side.

It's All Text

This simple tool allows me to spawn an Emacs client to edit any text area on a web-page. It's what I use when I'm making blog posts and pretty much any non-trivial amount of web based text entry. While it might be tempting to do the Greasemonkey treatment to something like Ymacs to get something close to the Emacs experience there is really no substitute for the real thing. Especially, as you may have noticed, when you want to insert code snippets into your posts.

<h3>It's All Text</h3>
This simple <a href="http://trac.gerf.org/itsalltext">tool</a> allows
me to spawn an Emacs client to edit any text area on a web-page. It's
what I use when I'm making blog posts and pretty much any non-trivial

No Script

The Web 2.0 experience is certainly a good thing, browsers have certainly moved from being a presenter of static pages to being a platform where all sorts of fantastic stuff can be done. However I still like to have control over who gets to run code in my browser.

I used to have Bug Me Not in my list of must-have extensions but to be honest I just skip stuff that requires registration these days. I'm looking forward to Murdoch's content dropping off the search engines radar when he finally learns to use robots.txt.

So are there any extensions essential to your Firefox experience? Or have you already made the jump to Chrome(ium)? Or do you still see something in Opera that I never could?