It's All Text

Via Chromatic's post at the O'Reilly OnLamp blog, I tried out the It's All Text Firefox extension and I have to say I love it!

This extension lets you quickly bring up your favourite text editor any time you need to enter text on a web page. I find my own Blogger comment entry box for instance woefully small and inept. With this add-on installed, I can either right-click in the text box and choose "It's All Text" from the popup menu, or click the semi-transparent edit button that the extension puts at the bottom right of text boxes. If you haven't set an editor preference yet, it'll ask you to do so the first time.

From then on, once you do it, your editor of choice (gVim in my case) will pop up and when you save the document, the text gets pasted into the text box. Nice and simple.

I don't think it works in Gmail's rich text mode when composing an email, but a quick switch to plain text mode reveals the edit button once again. You shouldn't really be in Rich Text mode anyway should you... ;) Of course you can always compose the bulk of the text in plain text mode and then once it's been pasted in, switch to rich mode to add links and such.

All in all, a very useful tool. If you do a lot typing on the web and miss using your favourite offline editing tool, check it out.