Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - edit with emacs

Edit with Emacs v1.16 released

2020-12-24T16:10:00+00:00

Despite what I said last time it seems that this is still a useful tool for me. I had some free time to peruse some of the open issues and managed to work out what was breaking the GMail interaction and work out a fix. While Atomic Chrome provides a nicer interactive experience with direct feedback the release of Crostini keeps the Emacs flame alive on my Chromebook. I suspect I still need someone to step up who is more conversant in the web languages of Javascript and CSS to improve the front end experience and maybe tackle the frequently requested feature of interaction with fancy javascript editors. In the meantime I'll continue to bumble along and look at what pull requests do come in and leave the pile of feature requests slowly growing.

Merry Christmas ;-)

v1.16

Extension

allow disabling of switch to settings behaviour
whitelist penguin.linux.test for edit server (ChromeOS/Crostini)
fix context menu on newer Chromes (#158)
honour edit_server_host instead of hard-coding 127.0.0.1
use the Chrome/Firefox extension UI to set keyboard shortcuts.
fix handling of spellcheck=false nodes for Gmail (#171, #162)

edit-server.el

use make-frame (see updated docs for edit-server-new-frame-alist)

Edit with Emacs v1.15 released

2018-01-17T16:47:00+00:00

After a bit of hiatus there was enough of a flurry of patches to make it worth pushing out a new release. I'm in a little bit of a quandary with what to do with this package now. It's obviously a useful extension for a good number of people but I notice the slowly growing number of issues which I'm not making much progress on. It's hard to find time to debug and fix things when it's main state is Works For Me. There is also competition from the Atomic Chrome extension (and it's related emacs extension). It's an excellent package and has the advantage of a Chrome extension that is more actively developed and using a bi-directional web-socket to communicate with the edit server. It's been a feature I've wanted to add to Edit with Emacs for a while but my re-factoring efforts are slowed down by the fact that Javascript is not a language I'm fluent in and finding a long enough period of spare time is hard with a family. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that realistically this package is in maintenance mode and you shouldn't expect to see any new development for the time being. I'll of course try my best to address reproducible bugs and process pull requests in a timely manner. That said please enjoy v1.15:

Extension

* Now builds for Firefox using WebExtension hooks
* Use chrome.notifications instead of webkitNotifications
* Use

with style instead of inline for edit button * fake "input" event to stop active page components overwriting text area

edit-server.el

* avoid calling make-frame-on-display for TTY setups (#103/#132/#133)
* restore edit-server-default-major-mode if auto-mode lookup fails
* delete window when done editing with no new frame

Get the latest from the Chrome Webstore.

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 v1.12 now available

2012-12-03T21:58:00+00:00

Apologies for the extended delay in getting out a new release of Edit with Emacs. Real life has been doing a good job keeping me busy that spare hacking time is in short supply. A number of people have submitted pull requests and I've also done a bit of clean-up on the code.

The JavaScript in the extension has had the hacky change tracking code replaced with a modern funky 21st century Mutation Observer implementation. This should solve some of the more obvious performance problems on highly dynamic pages.

I've also implemented the iterative save method for edit-server.el. Unfortunately it doesn't quite work as intended if the edited region uses encoding (e.g. longlines). In theory the buffer you have saved should have it's contents replaced with the new data from the browser but it just doesn't seem to work. For now I've just ensured the kill-ring has the real data in it so it's not overly painful to restore formatting. Patches and/or explanations are of course welcome!

So grab it now from webstore. The changes are as follows:

Extension

* Upgraded manifest to version 2 for future releases of Chrome
* Added an "Enable Debug" flag to control logging to console
* Use Mutation Observers to better track changes in dynamic DOMs
* Fake a keypress when updating the textarea
* Bug fix for handling editable DIV elements

edit-server.el

* Now available from the MELPA package archive!
* Beta support for iterative C-x C-s saving (it works but is ugly, see kill-ring)
* Default to using UTF-8 coding for process communication
* Raise existing frame consistently on Mac
* Tweak the portion of the URL used to name buffers

Edit with Emacs v1.11

2012-05-23T15:57:00+01:00

I haven't really had much time for hacking at home unless programming my daughters wetware counts. However a few enterprising users have been sending me in some pull requests that fix a few minor bugs that slipped through the extensive pre-release testing I did for v1.10 so I thought it was worth pushing out a bug-fix release:

Extension

* Fixed some breakage to the "edit focused area" feature

* Fixed broken link to embedded edit-server

edit-server.el

* A couple of fixes for Emacs 24 compatibility

* Globalize the minor mode so it persists through major-mode changes

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.

Call for testing for Edit with Emacs

2011-10-30T22:55:00+00:00

I've been doing a bunch of house-keeping on Edit with Emacs recently in preparation for a new release. I can only apologise to those people who have submitted patches and merge requests for my tardiness. I'm afraid Real Life ^tm has been taking precedence.

As regular readers of the non-emacs sections of my blog will be aware my recreational coding time is about to be severely curtailed. As it's been a while since the last release and a number of new features have been added it would be nice to get some wider testing. I therefor am hoping to elicit the help of the Emacs community to check out the code and give the tires a bit of a kick before I push out the final release to "the cloud". I'd rather not regress behaviour for the 1917 users who get Edit with Emacs from the Chrome store just before I disappear into a haze of nappies and parental responsibilities. The current changes over the last release are:

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

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

Almost there

2010-11-19T22:48:00+00:00

I thought I might just mention the current state of the development for Edit with Emacs. A number of useful contributions have come in but I want to be able the "incremental edit" feature in the elisp edit server. I had a go but got stuck (marvel at hack in progress). So if anyone fancies having a go be my guest ;-)

The rest is as follows:

Ryszard Szopa (1):
      Allow the server to send correct Unicode to Chrome.

gfxmonk (4):
      trigger a DOM change() event when textarea content has changed
      clarify that the shortcut key is Enter, not "E"
      only re-request edit when "x-open" header is "true", not merely present
      Made indentation consistent across all source files